Читать книгу Bauhaus. 1919-1933 - Michael Siebenbrodt - Страница 16

Swiss architect Hannes Meyer became the new director in 1928. This was preceded by a period of limited donations and a stagnation of good relations between the city of Dessau and its modern institute. The results were dismissals and further limitations imposed on the already very restricted workshops. The precarious situation worsened when the Bauhaus Ltd, despite intense efforts, could not find new customers for its newly-developed products; necessary income was missing. Criticism of the Bauhaus increased. It now came also from representatives of the SPD and there were even tensions with the mayor of Dessau, Hesse. This transferred to parts of the population, whose reservations against the Bauhaus increased as well. Dessau’s lower middle class in particular considered what was carried on in the school as a danger to public order. The Bauhaus was denounced as a breeding ground for “cultural bolshevism” and avoided by many Dessau citizens.

Gropius was constantly busy with battles for the survival of the institution, and when internal problems also increased he gave up. He resigned from his position as director of the Bauhaus and suggested Hannes Meyer as his successor. Gropius stated that he wanted to build more, and considered again, this time somewhere else, the foundation of a “housing construction factory.” The Bauhaus, so he thought, was firmly established and no longer required his leadership. It can be suspected that Gropius saw his goals fulfilled particularly in the pedagogical sector with the establishment of an architecture department and that he was now lacking motivation for further school experiments. Along with Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer also left the school.

Hannes Meyer took office as Bauhaus director on 1st April 1928. In the 1920s, he had been one of the most prominent representatives of a radical scientific functionalism with ideologically left-wing views. On the basis of his Weltanschauung, he reformed the education and workshop production of the Bauhaus and subjected the school to profound restructuring. Under his leadership, the metal, furniture and mural-painting workshops were combined into the “Interior Furnishing Workshop”, while the “Advertising and Marketing Workshop” included the formerly independent workshops for printing, advertising, exhibitions, photography and sculpting. Workshop production was oriented in general toward “people’s household goods”, expanded into a production operation and pushed so that teaching, experimentation and production for a real market were fused. “Necessities, not luxuries”, was Meyer’s motto. The Bauhaus, whose products Meyer had earlier criticised as “sect-like and aesthetic”,[9] should more than before be “a combination of workshop work, free art and science”.[10]

Adolf Hofmeister, Cartoon of Hannes Meyer’s dismissal, 1930

When Hannes Meyer succeeded Walter Gropius, what was supposed to be avoided at the Bauhaus had already been extensively established: the “Bauhaus style.” Even chequered underwear advertised the Bauhaus style. How had this happened? Gropius proclaimed his design principle of nature research on the basis of the unification of art and technology in 1925. This nature analysis was, however, not carried out according to empirically scientific criteria in the Bauhaus under Gropius, as was discovered by Gropius researcher Winfried Nerdinger. The nature of an object, according to Nerdinger, was sought for in its purpose. By equating purpose and nature, the purposeful form was aestheticised without further questioning, and that initially meant geometric forms.

Thus the products which were meant to serve the “new man” in a “new time” were subject to a vocabulary of geometric forms based on the design theories of art teachers, and Meyer initially sought to fight the “Bauhaus style” after taking office as director.[11] He put forward an analysis of social and economic questions which should eventually form the beginnings of the design process. Yet he did not succeed in fully communicating his approach, so it found its way into only a few elements of design practise. On the one hand, previously lacking engineering sciences were integrated into the curriculum, but on the other hand, the expansion of the art classes of the teachers of the Bauhaus and the “free painting classes” by Klee and Kandinsky eventually meant less of an integration and more of what seemed like the intentional exclusion of a specific field of learning. For Meyer, “art was strangling life” in the Bauhaus of his predecessor, which is why he wanted to limit the artists’ influence. The path was to lead “from formal intuition to construction science education”.[12] Meyer wanted education at the Bauhaus to be functional, constructive and collectivist, thus conditioning the school for the times ahead.

The nine-semester education system was structured as follows: Mondays were reserved for music education, while scientific subjects were scheduled for Fridays. In the time between, work was carried out all day in the workshops, reminiscent of a factory setting. Saturdays were reserved for sports. A specialisation then followed in the architecture department, which Meyer had subdivided into construction theory and building department. The two educational goals were now called “artist” or “production or construction engineer.” Work and classes in the workshops as preparation for work in architecture thus corresponded completely to Walter Gropius’s original approach. Under Meyer’s leadership, the school’s limits were stretched when the number of students increased to two hundred, whose acceptance into the school was facilitated by the exclusion of some of the most talented people. The reason for this was the intention, according to the pedagogics of the Bauhaus to enable the “real” integration of a maximum number of people in society. In many points Meyer agreed in principle with the conceptual approach of his predecessor. Thus, for both men, building was a truly social development of “organisation of life processes” (as Gropius put it). But where Meyer’s concept was different from Gropius’s was in its affinity towards co-operative movements and the associated views going back to Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi regarding the sense in building “small circles” – family, work associations of artists and designers. For Gropius, the principle of nature research applied, while for Meyer the systematic determination of the need was the basis of design. From the basis of this concept, Meyer did not only design his architecture but also organised the “vertical brigades” within which students of different levels of education worked on one project from the drawing board to the building site. In terms of enthusiasm for co-operatives as well as for building commissions, the city of Dessau provided a good opportunity with the commission of the Laubenganghäuser (Balcony Access Houses). Other buildings produced from 1928 to 1930, such as the complex for the Federal School of the ADGB (General German Federation of Labor Unions) in Bernau near Berlin and the Nolden House in the Eifel were also successful. The exhibition Bauhaus Housing for the People, which had been designed by the Bauhaus and was travelling the country in order to open up a market for Bauhaus products, gained much attention but not the hoped-for sales. Only the Bauhaus wallpaper created by Bauhaus students in Dessau in 1929 became a sales hit.

Hannes Meyer failed. This failure was mainly a result of the fact that he had permitted a left-wing political radicalisation to develop within the student body starting in 1928 and was not able to mediate the process enough to prevent damage to the institution’s image. The school’s practise of open discourse, its general love of experimentation, including discussion of political and social problems was, as it turned out, hard to convey to the general public. In fact, the general public did not permit it. When an organised group of Communist students, which had been banned under Hannes Meyer’s directorship following outside pressure, eventually called publicly for participation in the “world revolution” and 60 % of the school’s students participated in a KPD demonstration, the relationship between the Bauhaus and the Dessau city elders, who feared a loss of votes with such a “red Bauhaus”, became intolerable. With the support of anti-communist Bauhaus teachers such as Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, who saw their positions threatened by Meyer’s restructuring, and also of Walter Gropius, who disliked Meyer’s criticism of the Bauhaus, as well as the mayor Fritz Hesse and his state curator Ludwig Grote, Meyer was discharged from his post of director of the Bauhaus in August 1930. Initially, Meyer successfully fought the discharge but resigned from his post as a result of an arbitration settlement.

Portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, c. 1931