The Total Architect

WHEN ART steps off her pedestal to embrace everyman, she becomes a daily social concern. When the problems of art and design are looked at as the problems of everyman, they become the problems of family, government, education, and all social institutions. The late Walter Gropius, founder and head of the Bauhaus (1919-33)--the famous German design school--put art in such a position: art became intimate with the present, and took up the humanist torch to serve man and society. After fleeing from Nazi Germany, Gropius furthered this ideal as Chairman of the Department of Architecture at Harvard from 1938-52.

The painter-teacher Oskar Schlemmer hints at the German school's uniqueness: "The actual structure of the Bauhaus finds expression in its leader and is not restricted to any dogma, with an awareness of all that is now and topical in the world and with good motives for assimilating it...Hence the battle of minds, in the open or in secret, as perhaps nowhere else, a constant unrest, compelling the individual almost daily to take a stand on profound problems."

It is thus through its progressive ideas in teaching, that the Bauhaus leaves its greatest mark. It trained not only the artist but also the craftsman, engineer, industrial designer, and architect. Through a preliminary design course, and the program of basic workshops the Bauhaus led its students to work together in solving practical problems.

IN AN ARTICLE on "Education Toward Creative Design, in 1937," Gropius explained the preliminary course as"...a complete co-ordinated training of all handicrafts, technique, and form, with the object of team building." These first six months were then followed by one workshop of the student's own choice: anything from pottery to stage-design and photography. Set up in the Dewey tradition of learning-by-doing, a then radical idea of education, these workshops served as the core of the Bauhaus structure. The students familiarized themselves with their materials and with production processes, picking up practical experience uncommon for architecture students.

Mrs. Ise Gropius, who continues to live in the house Gropius designed for his family in Lincoln, explains "My husband always believed that a good training in a craft, (it need only be one craft) prepares you for thinking in three-dimensional terms, which no drafting board does, or does only in a very theoretical way." "He had the feeling (that later on was corroborated by Herbert Read) that new ideas, new feelings for new developments altogether, came first to the practicing artist, not to the philosopher or scientist; they usually get the message a little later. Instinctive reaction, you know--Picasso or all these early people did things that later on were explained by Einstein and lots of other scientists or philosophers, but you almost always find a practicing three-dimensional artist or painter, or sculptor: they are usually the first to come across the ideas, and they were of enormous importance in the beginning to set people on a totally different track."

AS A RESULT of his feelings about the primary importance of the artist in the development of ideas, Gropius's great concern was in choosing the teacher who could best communicate with and stimulate his students. The idea of teamwork was of primary importance, as we can still see today in the architectural firm that he set up, The Architect's Collaborative (TAC) Cambridge, a firm that works with a project leader--a head architect--who makes all final decisions but works with others to clarify his own scheme. It is not committee architecture where there are 10 people doing aspects of one scheme, but rather teamwork to help one man express an idea.

The master-teachers and students at the Bauhaus worked in similar collaboration. Says Mrs. Gropius. "The teachers were in touch with these young people; they worked mostly together...I mean the teachers were not remote; they worked on problems together."

And the problems went beyond the physical limits of the workshop. The students worked with the teaching staff in resolving the problems of the entire school. As Mrs. Gropius points out in the recent Jan.-Feb. edition of Architectural Forum, there were two student representatives on the faculty-council where all problems concerning the whole school were discussed openly. A radical aspect of these meetings, more so than letting students on the committee, was that "they never came to decisions by majority vote. Whenever irreconcilable viewpoints persisted among faculty members or with student representatives. Gropius did not try to blunt the issue by compromises, but let instead the opinions stand in stark contrast to be worked out by continuing experiments and discussions. Some of them never found a generally accepted solution while others resolved themselves by a gradual shift of opinion, thanks to new experiments and tests."

THE PHOTOGRAPHS at the Fogg (sponsored by TAC, Mrs. Gropius and the International Exhibitions Fund in Washington, D.C.) illustrate Gropius's ideas of education and his conviction of the importance of the artist's vision for the whole of human concerns and endeavors. We can see in a plan for the "Megastructure" of 1928 the prophetic concept of day-care centers and housing for equal sexes. An entire floor is reserved for children's activities and day-care facilities, while the plan for living units shows what Mrs. Gropius calls "total change in the social order...visualized by Gropius, a change that would bring about the equality of the sexes and would make the individual the basic cell of the state, rather than the family."

Prominantly illustrated in the exhibit is Gropius's concern with lower-income groups, his efforts to create pre-fabricated houses and furniture in order to keep budgets down--but not to sacrifice form. His work also extends to automobile, locomotive, and factory design; here, too, he reached to handle the problems of society. The photographs in the exhibit show exactly how he solved some of these architectural problems: the walls of all glass, often called glass-curtain walls (as in the Fagus Shoe-Last Factory, 1911), convey an airiness and transparency never before attributed to building structures; the modular furniture and even buildings, like the faculty-housing for Dessau Bauhaus, are each really identical, but are built as mirror-image units, and are further differentiated by being placed at 90 degree angles.

Unfortunately, we only get snatches of the buildings by looking at these photographs; we are not drawn into the life of the structures, but only given a historical catalogue. Yet, the imagery of his buildings stands on its own, the form handsomely following function; Gropius's devotion to the arts and conviction in the artistic vision has been an overriding yet unproclaimed force in liberal education. It was Gropius's idea that the artist would be at the core of a liberal system of education. He had hoped to make Harvard his proving ground; "It was," says Mrs. Gropius, "his wishful thinking."

The master-teachers and students at the Bauhaus worked in similar collaboration. Says Mrs. Gropius. "The teachers were in touch with these young people; they worked mostly together...I mean the teachers were not remote; they worked on problems together."

And the problems went beyond the physical limits of the workshop. The students worked with the teaching staff in resolving the problems of the entire school. As Mrs. Gropius points out in the recent Jan.-Feb. edition of Architectural Forum, there were two student representatives on the faculty-council where all problems concerning the whole school were discussed openly. A radical aspect of these meetings, more so than letting students on the committee, was that "they never came to decisions by majority vote. Whenever irreconcilable viewpoints persisted among faculty members or with student representatives. Gropius did not try to blunt the issue by compromises, but let instead the opinions stand in stark contrast to be worked out by continuing experiments and discussions. Some of them never found a generally accepted solution while others resolved themselves by a gradual shift of opinion, thanks to new experiments and tests."

THE PHOTOGRAPHS at the Fogg (sponsored by TAC, Mrs. Gropius and the International Exhibitions Fund in Washington, D.C.) illustrate Gropius's ideas of education and his conviction of the importance of the artist's vision for the whole of human concerns and endeavors. We can see in a plan for the "Megastructure" of 1928 the prophetic concept of day-care centers and housing for equal sexes. An entire floor is reserved for children's activities and day-care facilities, while the plan for living units shows what Mrs. Gropius calls "total change in the social order...visualized by Gropius, a change that would bring about the equality of the sexes and would make the individual the basic cell of the state, rather than the family."

Prominantly illustrated in the exhibit is Gropius's concern with lower-income groups, his efforts to create pre-fabricated houses and furniture in order to keep budgets down--but not to sacrifice form. His work also extends to automobile, locomotive, and factory design; here, too, he reached to handle the problems of society. The photographs in the exhibit show exactly how he solved some of these architectural problems: the walls of all glass, often called glass-curtain walls (as in the Fagus Shoe-Last Factory, 1911), convey an airiness and transparency never before attributed to building structures; the modular furniture and even buildings, like the faculty-housing for Dessau Bauhaus, are each really identical, but are built as mirror-image units, and are further differentiated by being placed at 90 degree angles.

Unfortunately, we only get snatches of the buildings by looking at these photographs; we are not drawn into the life of the structures, but only given a historical catalogue. Yet, the imagery of his buildings stands on its own, the form handsomely following function; Gropius's devotion to the arts and conviction in the artistic vision has been an overriding yet unproclaimed force in liberal education. It was Gropius's idea that the artist would be at the core of a liberal system of education. He had hoped to make Harvard his proving ground; "It was," says Mrs. Gropius, "his wishful thinking."