Archinect - News

For the record, the Bauhaus was a school, not a style

2019-05-01T14:09:00-04:00

While architecture was not taught at the school for the first half of its existence, even today we speak of “Bauhaus architecture” and feel confident that we know precisely what that means — even though, often, what we call “Bauhaus” has no connection to the school at all.

100 years after the inauguration of the famed Bauhaus school, we must still be reminded of some of its most essential principles. Namely, Barry Bergdoll admonishes, the Bauhaus was never a 'style' - it was a school of thought that advocated for the abolition of distinctions between the various fields of art, as well as that between "the fine and the useful."

Benita Koch-Otte, Woven Wall Hanging, 1923-24. Manufactured by Bauhaus

As Bergdoll argues, the term 'Bauhaus' "has become a catchall synonym for modernism in architecture and design. The details of the school’s history — the huge diversity of forms, ideologies, opinion and experiments, not to mention the influence of its three directors — are more the concerns of academic historians than of those who continue to burnish the legend and exploit the selling power of the name 'Bauhaus.' No less does it remain a term of derision for neo-traditionalists, who see the modernist Bauhaus as the great destroyer of values enshrined in classi...

Marcel Breuer and the Invention of Heavy Lightness

2018-06-12T23:18:00-04:00

How could an architect who had made the pursuit of lightness the essence of his design aspirations become one of the great form-givers of the aesthetics of weightiness?

In this rich examination of the work of Marcel Breuer, Barry Bergdoll explores the marked shifts between his early European and later American work, and finds a constant in the pursuit of lightness. In his efforts to reconcile vernacular traditions with modern expression and the conditions of contemporary life, Bergdoll argues, Breuer created buildings that "held heavy and light in remarkable equipoise."

Will Mies van der Rohe’s Wolf House rise again?

2016-04-01T15:49:00-04:00

A group of German architects and planners has started a campaign to rebuild the Wolf House, widely seen as a link between van der Rohe’s early, more conventional designs and his later buildings, like the Barcelona Pavilion and the Farnsworth House, that would redefine modern architecture. [...] But the plan has run into resistance from other architects and scholars who say that the Wolf House would be too hard to reconstruct [...].

Justin Davidson on MoMA’s Departing Barry Bergdoll

2013-08-01T19:41:00-04:00

When MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design Barry Bergdoll gives up his post at the end of the summer and returns to his tenured lair at Columbia University, the museum will lose a quiet crusader. MoMA can feel corporate and aloof, but in his domain, Bergdoll has displayed an uncanny sense of timing, using each exhibition to set a real-world agenda that frequently outlasts its run.