THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW July 1936
[A Magazine of Architecture and Decoration]
László Moholy-Nagy [Photographer/Designer]
J [ames]. M[aude]. Richards [Editor], László Moholy-Nagy [Photographer/Designer]: THE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW [A Magazine of Architecture and Decoration]. London: The Architectural Press, Volume LXXX, No. 476, July 1936. Folio. Perfect bound and stitched printed wrappers. 52 [lxxviii] pp. Illustrated articles and period trade advertisements. Wrappers edgeworn with spine creased and chipped. From the library of English painter, illustrator and graphic artist Edward Bawden CBE RA (1903–1989), with his signature to front wrapper. Wrappers edgeworn with spine chipping and soiling to rear panel. Textblock thumbed, but a very good example of a rare suvivor.
11 x 14 magazine with 130 pages of illustrated articles and period trade advertisements. The Architectural Review’s generous size refused to simply be tucked under your arm and read while commuting, instead it demands to be read while perhaps relaxing in a Model B3 chair away from your desk. The bold text commands your attention—but there isn’t too much of it—while the cover illustrations were relevant to the content inside—and thus gave a teasing glimpse into the world of Modernist Architecture. Visually the Review positioned itself as a periodical that made statements so you wanted to keep on your fitted bookcase (or perhaps in your Penguin Book Donkey) so that you can refer back to this bible of good taste in the future.
László Moholy-Nagy’s produced his most concentrated body of work since leaving Dessau in 1928 during his short tenure in London (1935–1937). In less than two years in the United Kingdom, he produced interior design and display at Simpson's Piccadilly and the re-design of the advertisement material, from letterhead to poster layout to leaflet, for Imperial Airways, as well as the design of a travelling exhibition in a train wagon, and a poster commission for "London Transport;” received film commissions for Lobsters (1935) and New Architecture and the London Zoo (1936); began to explore painting on transparent plastics; was the subject of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Czech architect, Frantisek Kalivoida, in the Arts and Crafts School in Ceské Budejovice (Budweis), which travelled to the House of Artists in Brno (Brünn); participated in the Abstraction-Création group exhibition in Paris; designed special effects for Alexander Korda's film, Things to Come; designed invitations and posters for exhibitions at the London Gallery; with Marcel Breuer designed the exhibitor's stand for Courtauld's at the London Arts and Crafts Fair; designed the dust jackets and photographs the illustrations for three books: The Street Markets of London by Mary Benedetta (1936), Eton Portrait by Bernard Fergusson (1937) and An Oxford University Chest by John Betjeman (1938) as well as serving as Designer and Photographer for the July 1936 Architectural Review.
Contents include:
- Leisure at the Seaside: 20-page special section designed and photographed by László Moholy-Nagy that includes three plates by Moholy-Nagy: ‘Me and My Gal at Brighton’ and ‘Brighton Front’—both tipped-in black and white halftones, and ‘The Main Staircase in the Bexhall Pavilion,’ a full-page halftone photograph.
- Foreword. Before the advent of cheap travel, the English took their leisure at the seaside, immersing themselves in its social rituals, sticky pleasures and delightfully folkloric structures. That end-of-the-pier salaciousness was presented by the exiled László Moholy-Nagy with daring circular cut-outs revealing glimpses of assorted recreational antics.
- The English at the Seaside: Osbert Lancaster. A social and architectural history of seaside towns, mixing observation with waspish comment. Carousels, promenades, donkeys, bathing machines, tea shops, boarding houses, swimsuits and model railways were all considered fair game, reflecting the Review’s interest in colourful local vernacular.
- The Visitor: H. B. Brenan
- The New Leisure: Harry Roberts
- The Architect: Peter Maitland [pseudonym for the architect Serge Chermayeff – Erich Mendelsohn’s architectural partner for the De La Warr Pavilion]. Chermayeff opined on the problems of British seaside architecture and how the De La Warr Pavilion has addressed those issues. The authors particularly scathing comments about some aspects of British seaside culture—in particular about ‘mustard and cress’ in side street tea shops—may have given a hint as to the real identity of the writer.
- The Land Utilization Survey of Britain: E. Maxwell Fry
- Arlington House, St. James: Michael Rosenauer, Architect
- House at Saillon , Switzerland: Alberto Sartoris, Architect
- Minor Masterpeices of the Nineteenth Century: J. M. Richards
- The Architectural Review Decoration Supplement
Hyungmin Pai suggested that ‘Architecture was established as an institution through the agency of an array of texts and images’ during the modern period. This kind of new thinking by The Architectural Review Editor was visible in their commission of László Moholy-Nagy for the layout and photography of the feature on leisure at the seaside, of which the De La Warr Pavilion makes up a section.
Moholy-Nagy’s writings on photography from 1932 shows an understanding for the potential of photography to amplify architecture. ‘[With the help] of the new school of architects, we have attained an enlargement and sublimation of our appreciation of space, the comprehension of a new spatial culture’ Moholy-Nagy wrote in his essay titled “A New Instrument of Vision.” He believed that photography could help architecture be understood in a new way.Traditional sketches and technical plans belonged to a time before modernism; only photography provided a new experience that could convey the dynamism found in modern architecture.
Photography, Walter Benjamin observed in 1935, unshackles buildings from their sites, and as a consequence ‘the cathedral leaves its place to be received in the studio of the art-lover.’ But in the process architecture, which he called the prototype of a collective art, is privatized. And where it had previously been perceived tactilely, in a state of habitual distraction—a good thing, in Benjamin’s opinion, since this deflected the cult-like devotion lavished on artworks—it was transformed into precisely that: an object of contemplation, and a commodity to boot. If architecture was the prototype of a collective art, for Benjamin the up-to-date version was not still photography, but cinema. However his contemporaries cast doubts on his utopian dreams of film’s revolutionary potential − justifiable doubts, it turned out. Benjamin, a German Jew, was writing on the topic from Parisian exile, and five years later he killed himself as he fled a regime skilled as none other in the manipulation of images, not least images of architecture.
Moholy-Nagy saw parallels between the public reception of both modern photography and modernist architecture. Moholy-Nagy describes photography as ‘a “mechanical” thing’ that was ‘regarded so contemptuously in an artistic and creative sense’ – this was the same uphill battle that modernist architecture was fighting.
Not only that, but the proponents of modernist architecture often suggested that good architecture should work like a machine, supporting the inhabitants of the building mechanically wherever possible. For these reasons it makes sense for The Architectural Review to select bold photography when considering its layouts, especially that of Moholy-Nagy who arguably understood the potential for photography as a modernist intervention better than any other photographic artist at the time. It was, after all, Moholy-Nagy who predicted our contemporary obsession with imaging when he stated that “the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike.”
In addition to Moholy-Nagy being commissioned to illustrate and lay out this section on Leisure at the Seaside, there are four contributing writers named. This collaborative group-work ethos reflects that of the MARS Group (Modern Architectural Research Group), and reflected the labour politics of the time —working together in order to improve conditions for everyone. Many of the main figures pushing for modernist architectural practice at this time were associated with the MARS Group that largely had utopian and socialist aims.
The feature on Seaside Architecture can be read three ways: as a textual essay, an illustrated essay, or potentially as a photo essay by ignoring the text. White spaces and bled out images are interspersed with illustrations that seem casually splashed across the pages in comparison with the rigid demarcation of the photography. Moholy-Nagy not only tells the story of historical architecture to modernist architecture with the subjects of the images, but also with the framing and composition. The images at the bottom of page eight are quite old fashioned in their character. They recall earlier styles of photographing scenes, from a standard eyelevel view that remains static from image to image. This suits the buildings being shown, which are typical British seaside promenades of the kind the article is suggesting we should replace. We are then treated to montages of images that Moholy-Nagy seems to think represent British seaside culture: donkeys, piers, and pints of prawns are laid carefully out with the sheet music to ‘I do like to be beside the seaside.’ Inserted after page ten is a die-cut yellow card with circles reminiscent of classic Bauhaus designs cut out to allow voyeuristic glimpses through to Edwardian pictures of ladies promenading on the beach, and when the card flips over, a similar view of what Moholy-Nagy thought were the key elements of the British seaside town—food, relaxation, and entertainment.
As the article progresses, the photographic images become more abstract. On page 14 ‘the visitor’ is represented symbolically by a set of train tracks gently curving away to a vanishing point. Page 17 sees high vantage points turn chairs—and people—into repetitive patterns that echo earlier Moholy-Nagy photographs. His unusual perspectives began to creep in when the architecture turns more modern – the buildings are rarely shot at eye level, instead low or high points of view are preferred. The great spiral staircase of the De La Warr Pavilion is shot from low down and framed with leading lines composed from the floor tiles and the long horizontal lines of the auditorium façade. The almost full size image is framed with vibrant full bleed yellow – this is a picture that we should be paying attention to. Moholy-Nagy used this photo essay to guide readers through the building; the simplicity of the pictures mirrors the comments of how easy the De La Warr Pavilion itself was to navigate.
The Architectural Review is a periodical that clearly believed that visuals are as an important part of the architectural debate as the written word, one that goes to great lengths to push a message of social change for the better through modernist architecture. The De La Warr Pavilion must be understood not only as a great symbol for seaside development and an example for the leisure possibilities of a utopian society, but also as a well-designed machine where every material is carefully selected and every part of the design is considered as to how will interact with others.
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.
The Architectural Review was founded as a monthly magazine, the Architectural Review for the Artist and Craftsman, in 1896 by Percy Hastings, owner of the Architectural Press. In 1927 his third son, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, became joint editor (with Christian Berman) of both the Architectural Review and the Architects' Journal, a weekly. Together they made substantial changes to the aims and style of the review, which became a general arts magazine with an architectural emphasis. Contributors from other artistic fields were brought in, among them Hilaire Belloc, Robert Byron, Cyril Connolly, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Nash, Nikolaus Pevsner, P. Morton Shand, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. John Betjeman was an assistant editor from 1930 to 1934. The editorial board included Pevsner, Hugh Casson, Osbert Lancaster and James Maude Richards. The design of the review was innovative, with bold use of layout, typefaces and photographs; graphic elements were commissioned from Eric Gill and Edward Bawden. The articles on European Modernist architecture by P. Morton Shand published from July 1934 were among the earliest in Britain on the subject. By about 1935 the magazine had acquired a leading position in the discourse surrounding Modernism. The journal was influential after the Second World War in raising awareness of "townscape" (urban design), partly through regular articles by assistant editor Gordon Cullen, author of several books on the subject.