Bauhaus

Bauhaus

Bauhaus f

Bauhaus f

n. Bauhaus (Engelse rockgroep); moderne invloedrijke school (in Duitsland ontwikkeld aan begin van deze eeuw met aandacht op eenvoud en functionaliteit)

◙ n. באוהאוס, להקת רוק אנגלית; בית ספר לאמנויות ולשרטוט ארכיטקטוני מודרני בגרמניה (פותח בגרמניה בתחילת שנות ה- 1900 והתמקד בפשטות ושימושיות)

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◙ (תוישומישו תוטשפב דקמתהו 0091 -ה תונש תליחתב הינמרגב חתופ) הינמרגב ינרדומ ינוטקטיכרא טוטרשלו תויונמאל רפס תיב ;תילגנא קור תקהל,סואהואב◄

n. engelskt gotiskt rockband; betydande skola för modern arkitektonisk design (utvecklades i Tyskland i början av 1900-talet och betonar enkelhet och funktionalitet)

< art> ■ Bauhaus n

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Domestic appliances and interiors

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Breuer began his student days following an art course in Vienna, but joined the Bauhaus at Weimar, where he later graduated, in 1920. When Gropius re-established the school in purpose-built structures at Dessau, Breuer became a member of the teaching staff in charge of the carpentry and furniture workshops. Much of his time there was spent in design and research into new materials being applied to furniture and interior decoration. The essence of his contribution was to relate the design of furniture to industrial production; in this field he developed the tubular-steel structure, especially in chair design, and experimented with aluminium as a furniture material as well as pieces of furniture made up from modular units. His furniture style was characterized by an elegance of line and a careful avoidance of superfluous detail. By 1926 he had furnished the Bauhaus with such furniture in chromium-plated steel, and two years later had developed a cantilevered chair.

Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928 and set up an architectural practice in Berlin. In the early 1930s he also spent some time in Switzerland. Notable from these years was his Harnischmacher Haus in Wiesbaden and his apartment buildings in the Dolderthal area of Zurich. His architectural work was at first influenced by constructivism, and then by that of Le Corbusier (see Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). In 1935 he moved to England, where in partnership with F.R.S. Yorke he built some houses and continued to practise furniture design. The Isokon Furniture Co. commissioned him to develop ideas that took advantage of the new bending and moulding processes in laminated wood, one result being his much-copied reclining chair.

In 1937, like so many of the European architectural refugees from Nazism, he found himself under-occupied due to the reluctance of English clients to embrace the modern architectural movement. He went to the United States at Gropius's invitation to join him as a professor at Harvard. Breuer and Gropius were influential in training a new generation of American architects, and in particular they built a number of houses. This partnership ended in 1941 and Breuer set up practice in New York. His style of work from this time on was still modern, but became more varied. In housing, he adapted his style to American needs and used local materials in a functional manner. In the Whitney Museum (1966) he worked in a sculptural, granite-clad style. Often he utilized a bold reinforced-concrete form, as in his collaboration with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss in the Paris UNESCO Building (1953–8) and the US Embassy in the Hague (1954–8). He displayed his masterly handling of poured concrete used in a strikingly expressionistic, sculptural manner in his St John's Abbey (1953–61) in Collegeville, Minnesota, and in 1973 his Church of St Francis de Sale in Michigan won him the top award of the American Institute of Architects.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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A year after he began practice as an architect, Gropius was responsible for the pace-setting Fagus shoe-last factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine in Germany, one of the few of his buildings to survive the Second World War. Today the building does not appear unusual, but in 1911 it was a revolutionary prototype, heralding the glass curtain walled method of non-load-bearing cladding that later became ubiquitous. Made from glass, steel and reinforced concrete, this factory initiated a new concept, that of the International school of modern architecture.

In 1919 Gropius was appointed to head the new School of Art and Design at Weimar, the Staatliches Bauhaus. The school had been formed by an amalgamation of the Grand Ducal schools of fine and applied arts founded in 1906. Here Gropius put into practice his strongly held views and he was so successful that this small college, which trained only a few hundred students in the limited years of its existence, became world famous, attracting artists, architects and students of quality from all over Europe.

Gropius's idea was to set up an institution where students of all the arts and crafts could work together and learn from one another. He abhorred the artificial barriers that had come to exist between artists and craftsmen and saw them all as interdependent. He felt that manual dexterity was as essential as creative design. Every Bauhaus student, whatever the individual's field of work or talent, took the same original workshop training. When qualified they were able to understand and supervise all the aesthetic and constructional processes that made up the scope of their work.

In 1924, because of political changes, the Weimar Bauhaus was closed, but Gropius was invited to go to Dessau to re-establish it in a new purpose-built school which he designed. This group of buildings became a prototype that designers of the new architectural form emulated. Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928, only a few years before it was finally closed due to the growth of National Socialism. He moved to England in 1934, but because of a lack of architectural opportunities and encouragement he continued on his way to the USA, where he headed the Department of Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design from 1937 to 1952. After his retirement from there Gropius formed the Architect's Collaborative and, working with other architects such as Marcel Breuer and Pietro Belluschi, designed a number of buildings (for example, the US Embassy in Athens (1960) and the Pan Am Building in New York (1963)).

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berömd tysk arkitekt från början av 1900-talet (en av grundarna av Bauhaus Arkitektiska Institut)

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Mies van der Rohe was the son of a stonemason and his early constructional training came from his father. As a young man he gained experience of the modern school from study of the architecture of the earlier leaders, notably Peter Behrens, Hendrik Berlage and Frank Lloyd Wright. He commenced architectural practice in 1913 and soon after the First World War was establishing his own version of modern architecture. His building materials were always of the highest quality, of marble, stone, glass and, especially, steel. He stripped his designs of all extraneous decoration: more than any of his contemporaries he followed the theme of elegance, functionalism and an ascetic concentration on essentials. He believed that architectural design should not look backwards but should reflect the contemporary achievement of advanced technology in both its construction and the materials used, and he began early in his career to act upon these beliefs. Typical was his early concrete and glass office building of 1922, after which, more importantly, came his designs for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. These designs included his famous Barcelona chair, made from chrome steel and leather in a geometrical design, one which has survived as a classic and is still in production. Another milestone was his Tugendhat House in Brno (1930), a long, low, rectilinear structure in glass and steel that set a pattern for many later buildings of this type. In 1930 Mies followed his colleagues as third Director of the Bauhaus, but due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany it was closed in 1933. He finally left Germany for the USA in 1937, and the following year he took up his post as Director of Architecture in Chicago at what is now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology and where he remained for twenty years. In America Mies van der Rohe continued to develop his work upon his original thesis. His buildings are always recognizable for their elegance, fine proportions, high-quality materials and clean, geometrical forms; nearly all are of glass and steel in rectangular shapes. The structure and design evolved according to the individual needs of each commission, and there were three fundamental types of design. One type was the single or grouped high-rise tower, built for apartments for the wealthy, as in his Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1948–51), or for city-centre offices, as in his Seagram Building in New York (1954–8, with Philip Johnson) or his Chicago Federal Centre (1964). Another form was the long, low rectangle based upon the earlier Tugendhat House and seen again in the New National Gallery in Berlin (1965–8). Third, there were the grouped schemes when the commission called for buildings of varied purpose on a single, large site. Here Mies van der Rohe achieved a variety and interest in the different shapes and heights of buildings set out in spatial harmony of landscape. Some examples of this type of scheme were housing estates (Lafayette Park Housing Development in Detroit, 1955–6), while others were for educational, commercial or shopping requirements, as at the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963–9).

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the first of the twentieth, Poelzig did not, like most of his colleagues in Germany and Austria, follow the Jugendstil theme or the eclectic or fundamentalist lines: he set a path to individualism. In 1898 he began a teaching career at the Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) Academy of Arts and Crafts, remaining there until 1916. He early introduced workshop practice into the curriculum, presaging Gropius's Bauhaus ideas by many years; the school's workshop produced much of the artisan needs for a number of his buildings. From Breslau Poelzig moved to Dresden, where he was appointed City Architect. It was there that he launched his Expressionist line: which was particularly evident in the town hall and concert hall in the city. The structure for which Poelzig is best known and with which his name will always be associated is the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin; he had returned to his native city after the First World War and this great theatre was his first commission there. Using modern materials, he created a fabulous interior to seat 5,000 spectators. It was in the form of a vast amphitheatre with projecting stage and with the curving area roofed by a cavernous, stalactited dome, the Arabic-style stalactites of which were utilized by Poelzig for acoustic purposes. In the 1920s Poelzig went on to design cinemas, a field for which Expressionism was especially suited; these included the Capitol Cinema in Berlin and the Deli in Breslau. For his later industrial commissions—for example, the administrative building for the chemical firm I.G.Far ben in Frankfurt—he had perforce to design in more traditional modern manner.

Poelzig died in 1936, which spared him, unlike many of his contemporaries, the choice of emigrating or working for National Socialism.

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