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In this episode, The Path to Modernism: Why does the Bauhaus still rule today? Welcome to Two Architects and a Lawyer. Join architect Luis de Miguel in Valencia, and architect-lawyer William McLean in Vancouver for observations and commentary on all things design. Here are William and Luis in Part 1 of today's conversation. Well, hello, Luis. It's good to see you again. And I'm glad we're together for another one of these chats. I know you've been in Madrid the last few days,
0:38
and I just wanted to start by asking you how you find Madrid versus Valencia. What are the primary differences as you travel between those cities? Well, just bigger, that's all. I mean, you know, the downtown is a downtown, but the surrounding, immediately surrounding area to the downtown is quite a bit bigger and therefore many more places and things to do. One thing that's occurred to me about your traveling back and forth: I've been thinking about that in
1:11
the context of what we're going to talk about today, which is the Bauhaus. And unlike in the New World here, you're confronted with modern and not so modern in both those cities that we've just mentioned, Madrid and Valencia, you're confronted with that difference every time you walk down the street. Not so much here in Vancouver, of course, which is a very young city, just 145 years old. So that must be something that affects your perceptions of your environment,
1:43
that difference between modern and ancient. Well, as a matter yeah, you're right. One of the things that happens is that there are a few high-rise buildings. In fact, there are four, what would be considered high enough buildings, and they're very famous. And so, but that's about it in terms of skyline. It's very different from Paris, where Paris has all the old stuff and then they decided they were going to go wild north and
2:20
La Défense. And the same thing with London, although I think a lot of the new buildings in London, the high-rise are also downtown. So in that sense. I guess a lot of the buildings got destroyed in London, whereas not so much, I mean, obviously not here, we had a civil war, but we didn't have the blitzkrieg. So that makes a difference. I think, obviously wars make a huge difference. And I think that's part of what we're going to be talking about. You know,
2:58
I'm a firm believer that things don't happen in a vacuum. You know, particularly when it comes to art and architecture, which is a very slow-moving domain as it were. So when you look at the typical streets whether it be in Madrid or Paris or Barcelona for that matter, a lot of the buildings, say up to 1890, were neoclassical, edging on the Baroque. And we have some examples of that. And the one thing that people don't seem to realize, or at least it's been my experience that many
3:44
people don't understand how these buildings worked. These buildings housed, in fact, all the strata of society. You had the commerce at the bottom. Then you had the piano nobile, which was, you know, the commerce and the entrance of horses and where horses were kept and so on. Well, I know I drag on, but it, but it is a big deal here. The piano nobile, the noble floor were the marquis and the nobles and all this. And then as you went up, the people living there
4:28
were professionals. The apartments got smaller. Then you ended up with people in administration, civil servants, and so on. And then the workers, and at the very top, in what was called mansards, because there were literally cubby holes with a sloped roof, were typically the maids. So, everybody was aware of everybody else. And clearly this happened because it was very uncomfortable to walk up five, six stories. And it happened in New York as well. So that to me,
5:12
the big change that happened apart from the fact that, you know, they wanted to get rid of a lot of the decoration that we see in these buildings was the invention of the elevator. Let's get back to the topic that we're going to talk about today, which is at its most basic, the Bauhaus, but of course everything that flows from that and flowed to it. I think it's fair to say that most designers are familiar with the basic facts about the Bauhaus. We know it
5:47
as the school that gave us the "Less is More" philosophy that defines our modern world. But incredibly, it was a school that only lasted 14 years. As you mentioned war a minute ago, it grew out of the wreckage of World War I. That's a critical fact, I think. And in Germany, the Imperial Order had collapsed. There was a desperate, almost manic desire, as I understand it, to build something entirely new, not just new buildings, but a new way of being human,
6:22
in effect. So the Bauhaus was founded as kind of a radical response to the chaos of war. And its legacy isn't just in museums. It's in our view every day, in the hands of everybody. The clean lines of a phone, the simplicity of a curtain wall that we see downtown, the Sans Serif fonts we see on highway signs and many other places … we're living in the shadow of the Bauhaus. Maybe you could just talk about the context of the Bauhaus: what was surrounding it,
6:52
what led up to it, and what followed. How did how did this group manage to unlearn the lessons of the past so effectively they ended up writing the rules of the future? Well, one of the things was the roaring 20s, and the roaring 20s came about, and in terms of architecture, they explained or they exploited an aesthetic where decoration was forbidden. I think you mentioned that Adolf Loos said that "Decoration is a crime" or something to that
7:37
effect. And it's funny because at the beginning of the 20s or just before that, there was still the idea of decorating lavishly the entrances to the Métro and so on. But between the 20s and the 30s,
7:59
people were fed up with the war. And somehow this whole bearing of everything gave birth to something that ended up being Art Deco, which was a much more geometric, simple lines and so on. You know, even people like Frank Lloyd Wright succumbed to it. We talked about this the last time, about the series of stylistic movements that pass through Europe. And of course, we're centering on Europe in this discussion. Art Deco was perhaps
8:36
the last of that series before Modernism and before the Bauhaus changed everything. There's very little Art Deco left. Nobody would talk about the Art Deco approach to a particular project undertaken today, whereas the Bauhaus, which brought on Modernism, is still very much here today, 100 and more years later. So why that difference? What's the essential difference between the sequence of stylistic movements that ended in Art Deco ...
9:08
Well, like a lot of things in human experience: money. The Modernist movement of hardly any decoration or no decoration meant that they didn't have to spend a lot of money putting it in.
9:32
Machines were manufacturing all kinds of materials for construction that were not available before. Glass, steel, even bronze could be used because there was nothing else to add. So developers were extremely happy with the turn of events and they demanded curtain wall and very simple, say almost Cubist, type buildings and to get this general approval in the world particularly after World War II. The influence of America was so great that when it came time to do the United Nations,
10:28
New York was chosen, even though there were other cities, Paris, Geneva, and so on. And the reason why New York became the center for the UN was that Bill Zeckendorf, at the time a rather important land developer owner, owned this amazing piece of land right on the river. And they were mostly slums and, you know, not very desirable properties. But because he offered this thing, I mean, of course, when they took it, all the land that he owned, all the buildings that he owned
11:10
around that became, you know, multiplied in value. So anyhow, so they decided to do the UN there. And was the first curtain wall building that was built in the world. And the very first building, again, seeking the approval of the Americans was Lever House, designed by none other than Skidmore, Owens & Merrill, the most important architectural firm at the time. So once these people went that way, then it was okay for everybody else. Then somebody like Mies, could do his buildings,
11:55
which he had designed in the 20s of glass walls and so on, glass facades. When Seagram ... well, Seagram as you know, is owned by the Bronfman family, the Bronfman family has one of the daughters, or the daughter was Phyllis Lambert, who happens to be an architect. And she... she's the one that pushed her father to select Mies to do the Seagram building. Let's just stop there for a minute, because you're beginning to talk about Mies van
12:36
der Rohe. And Mies van der Rohe, of course, is extremely significant in the Bauhaus story. He was the third and final director of Bauhaus. But we haven't talked about where he came from and who preceded him at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. He was an idealist. His intention was to bring all the arts together in a single school. He wasn't particularly fixated on the idea of an architecture school, but during his tenure at
13:17
the Bauhaus architecture, of course, was one of many other arts that were seriously pursued. He was replaced after 1928 by Hans Meyer. He was a functionalist. His goal was "people's needs" instead of "luxury needs". He made the school profitable, which it had not been until that point. But his tenure as director was only a couple of years. He was followed by Mies. Mies was determined to turn Bauhaus into an architecture, a purely architecture school. And of course we
13:53
know Mies for his famous maxim, "Less is more." That's something that's repeated even today. Well, what's ironic about that is that Mies himself never took a single course in a school of architecture. So he in fact didn't have a degree in architecture officially. You know, not that he needed one clearly, but anyway, it's a bit ironic. And the thing about Mies and the thing about a lot of these architects, and I know that this is, you know it appears to be superficial,
14:35
but I think it's actually quite telling: Mies changed his name. It may have something to do with Modernism in the sense that one of the great achievements of the modern era was marketing, being able to turn nothing into money through clever positioning rearrangements. So that's possibly what's going on. But I don't think that's what was going on in the 1920s.
15:02
Yeah. Yes, why not? Of course it was going on in the 1920s, particularly in the 1920s when there were still a lot of princes around and there was still nobility and these guys, they came from factories or wherever, I don't know where Gropius came from, but I tell you, he wasn't a prince or a count or anything. And all these guys, they changed their names. It just made it more marketable. I don't know. I've got this idea that somehow money has to do with a lot of stuff.
15:39
Well, Mies van der Rohe, as I mentioned, was the last director of the Bauhaus: that was in Berlin. At this point, when Mies was director, the school had moved twice. It started in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925, Dessau. And finally to Berlin, it was chased for political reasons out of each of those places. And in Berlin, it was shut down by the Gestapo essentially. So in 1933,
16:14
the National Socialists had come into power in Germany. Things that were going on at the Bauhaus were intolerable to the regime. And Mies van der Rohe ended up self-deporting to America. Gropius had preceded him. Gropius ended up in Boston, at Harvard. And Mies ended up in Chicago, I think, to his disappointment. He thought that Gropius had the most prestigious location. But here were two
16:51
of the key Bauhaus players now transported to a different continent. And that's really the reason, isn't it, why the Bauhaus was able to spread so rapidly because of this geographical shift. Why do you, why, my point is that the Bauhaus, the legacy of the Bauhaus was this sort of, this international style that went all over the world. And my point is that they embraced it because it was cheap to do badly as it were. But I mean, it was very cheap. So I think that
17:33
was the big success in a lot of places. And I see curtain wall, even down the street here, there's buildings with curtain wall, I mean, it was something that was embraced by everybody and their brother. And I think it was something to do with economy. I don't know what your point is. Why do you think that everybody from here to Malaysia embraced this way of building? Well, I believe that obviously economy has something to do with it, but I think that so does
18:10
marketing. I think the marketing point that you made a minute ago applies in a kind of perverse way. The, because of the prestige that being a Bauhaus follower and practitioner brought with it at the time ... I'm presuming that, I'm not certain about that, but I'm presuming it. I think that in effect it acted as a licence to dispense with what had been a great burden up to that point, which was to worry about ornamentation, the additional detailing that Art Deco, which
18:44
was the movement that just preceded Modernism required. Suddenly that was not necessary from a philosophical point of view and this liberated designers to move on to consider other things. Do you remember, we had a Prof that said that one of the reasons why people weren't building buildings with decoration is because architects couldn't draw the decoration. Now, I don't know, maybe some couldn't, but I think if you really set your mind to it you could copy
19:23
the revolutes and all this sort of stuff. I think it had to do with the fact that basically we got rid of stone altogether and the new materials that were coming along. And I think it's very important for somebody sitting in Tokyo or in Beijing or someplace, having the approval, the seal of approval of the States at the time, of America at the time, was essential to the success of the thing. Now, whether that came about because of all
20:01
the propaganda and the advertising and the, you know, showing films of buildings in New York.
20:09
Let's just take a sideways step here because you mentioned the prestige of America and how that affected people in other countries deciding what to build or what was appropriate to build. At the same time that, or just before, the Bauhaus was revolutionizing thought about design. It's not as if they were the only source of innovation in the world. Frank Lloyd Wright was stepping away from Louis Sullivan's studio and branching out on his own. He produced
20:43
a series of buildings which you can't identify as being Bauhaus buildings. They're not at all conditioned on what came out of the Bauhaus. They don't appear to be part of that philosophy. They are a different understanding of how to deal with materials and spaces and he was very successful at it. He was not successful, unlike the Bauhaus, in marketing that view of the world, design world,
21:09
to the point where his approach to design became universal. But it was highly successful and it remains so today. And it's curious that it's an outlier. It does not fall into the kinds of buildings that we've been discussing up to this point. Why do you think that is? Well, yeah, but you know, what Frank Lloyd Wright did, you could almost call it Art Deco. You know, the Guggenheim in New York is an unbelievable building. I mean, first of all, the whole concept
21:45
of the spiral, you go up to the top floor and you walk down as you see the art and so on. I mean, it's absolutely brilliant. And the way it's sited in the city and so on. I mean, it's an amazing building, not to mention Fallingwater and all kinds of other buildings that he did. Wright famously came from the studio of Louis Sullivan. And we talked at the beginning of this conversation about the phrase which is most identified with the Bauhaus, which came from
22:19
Mies van der Rohe, and that phrase being "Less is more". But there are two other aphorisms about architecture, which we learned in architecture school and are repeated to this day. One of them is pretty ancient, it came from Vitruvius and it's "Venustas Utilitas Firmitas". And a better description of architecture I don't think has ever been invented. Come many centuries later, we get to Louis Sullivan and his famous maxim was "Form follows function". So whether or not that applied
22:58
in fact in practice to his own buildings is another question. But Frank Lloyd Wright certainly came from a studio where that idea, which was radical at the time, was taking root. He also came from a studio where ornamentation was highly developed. There was no master of ornamentation greater than Louis Sullivan. For example, the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago, the building in Buffalo, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo and so on. Right after he started
23:38
his own practice, he seemed to quickly move away from that highly ornamented ... Yes, because he went to Japan and he went to Germany and he went to France. I mean, he looked at the world and he came back with different ideas. But my point is that for other people, it was important what was happening in America, because America was the power, was strength, was modern, was what everybody wanted to be whether they like to admit it or not. And so,
24:16
I mean, it happened again. I'll just say something small. When postmodern came along, you know, Venturi and Graves and so on, everybody laughed at them. And then all of a sudden, Philip Johnson, a disciple of Mies, for one thing, a disciple of everybody and their brother. Philip Johnson embodied in a way in himself American architecture. He decided to do a building in New York City with a broken pediment. And he gave his seal of approval literally to this movement.
24:58
And once Philip Johnson did a building like that, then nobody laughed anymore. And so the idea of somebody doing, you know, somebody of weight doing something, you don't think I'm right, but okay. Well, they may not have laughed at the time, and you're absolutely right. It gets back to the marketing miracle of American society, somehow that everything about America is driven by marketing. But we're laughing now, are we not? It seems there was an initial... It was initially...
25:31
What about the broken pediment? Yeah, the broken pediment. Yes, yes, there's no question. I mean, the whole Postmodern thing was just ridiculous. It was a ridiculous thing. The only thing that I'll tell you something, I'll tell you, when you compare, say, Portlandia by Michael Graves to say the broken pediment in, I think it was the AT&T building in New York City, I mean, the best Postmodern building was Philip Johnson's. So it doesn't matter. As long as the architect is good,
26:16
the product will be as good as it can be. Now, whether he was a bit misled and he just thought he'd take a stab at it, okay, fine. I think you need the seal of approval because when you're discussing with your client and your client comes to you, you know, some huge corporation, US Steel comes to you and says, well, you know, we want a new headquarters. They don't want to look like some building from the 1800s or they don't want to make some classical thing. Different thing
26:50
if you're a bank. You know, other corporations, they want to show that they're forward thinking, they're right on the edge of technology and so on. So I think that's what drives stuff. William and Luis will continue their conversation in Part 2.
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