AMERICAN ARCHITECT AND ARCHITECTURE
December 1937
The New Bauhaus and Space Relationship
by L. Moholy-Nagy
Kenneth Kingsley Stowell [Editor]: AMERICAN ARCHITECT AND ARCHITECTURE. New York: Hearst Magazines, December 1937 [Vol. CL No. 2664]. Original edition. Quarto. Thick perfect-bound wrappers. 124 pp. Adverts. Illustrated throughout with drawings and photographic reproductions. Wrappers worn and soiled to edges with a sunned spine; first signature loosened, so a good or better copy.
8.75 x 12 perfect-bound magazine with 124 pages illustrated throughout with drawings and photographic reproductions and period trade advertisements showcasing the Architectural and Industrial Design of the American Streamline Moderne Machine Age aesthetic and the rise of the International Style in the United States.
Contents include:
- Frontispiece: Stage Lighting Device by L. Moholy-Nagy. Full-page image of the Light Space Modulator, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
- The New Bauhaus and Space Relationship by L. Moholy-Nagy. Six pages illustrated with black and white photographs and diagrams. The New Bauhaus in Chicago operated for less than one year between 1937 and 1938, and this Moholy-Nagy essay was one of his few published works during that period.
- Federal Reserve Building, WAshington D. C. by Paul P. Cret.
- Results of the Structural Clay Products Institute, Inc. 1937 Moderate Cost Home Competition. Work by H. Roy Kelley, etc.
- Pittsburgh: Section Prepared by Pittsburgh Guest Editors. Sixteen pages illustrated in black and white.
- Portfolio of Resilient Flooring
- Sheathed Chimney Breasts
- Fur Shop by Starrett and Van Vleck.
- Clothing Store in South Bend, IN: C. E. Swanson Associates and Ernest W. Young.
- Clothing Store in Westwood, CA: Allen C. Siple
- Shoe Store in Westwood, CA: Allen C. Siple
- Leon Barsha Residence: Richard J. Neutra.
- Departments include Trends, Books, Time-Saver Standards, Technical Digest, Techniques and more.
The Architectural and Building Press journal THE AMERICAN ARCHITECT was assimilated by Hearst Magazines in 1936 with the expanded title AMERICAN ARCHITECT AND ARCHITECTURE. In June 1936 the editiorial focus shifted away from the building trades and the dominance of the clubbish good old boy network of East Coast traditionalism and started to cover the rising influence of both homegrown and European modernism on the American scene. This shift predated the seismic arrival of Walter Gropius as the Head of the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Spring of 1937. Visually the magazine incorporated many tenets of the New Typography -- featuring asymmetric composition, bold subheads and use of Charles Coiner's Eagle Bold font, as well as gorgeous full-page photography that took full advantage of the engraving and press capabilities of the Hearst Publishing Empire.
László Moholy-Nagy [Hungarian, 1895 – 1946] was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology.” Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational program. He shared teaching duties with the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his.
The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances.
Although always a painter and designer, Moholy-Nagy became a key figure in photography in Germany in the 1920's. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and traveled to Amsterdam and London. His teachings and publications of photographic experimentations were crucial to the international development of the New Vision.
In 1937 former Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy accepted the invitation of a group of Midwest business leaders to set up an Industrial Design school in Chicago. The New Bauhaus opened in the Fall of 1937 financed by the Association of Arts and Industries as a recreation of the Bauhaus curriculum with its workshops and holistic vision in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy drew on several émigrés affiliated with the former Bauhaus to fill the ranks of the faculty, including György Kepes and Marli Ehrman. The school struggled with financial issues and insufficient enrollment and survived only with the aid from grants of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations as well as from donations from numerous Chicago businesses. The New Bauhaus was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944 and the school finally merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1949.
In Chicago Moholy aimed at liberating the creative potential of his students through disciplined experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms. The focus on natural and human sciences was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in Germany. Emerging from the basic course, various workshops were installed, such as "light, photography, film, publicity", "textile, weaving, fashion", "wood, metal, plastics", "color, painting, decorating" and "architecture". The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel or Harry Callahan.
Moholy-Nagy served as Director of the New Bauhaus in its various permutations until his death in 1946.