Everywhere in the world artists came about after the First world war, and Zero hour. International influence of the Bauhaus were the ideas of a New design. A success of the language particularly in the United States.
“As they threw themselves in front of you in the dust! What are the tributes!” wrote the American writer and Journalist Tom Wolfe on the arrival of the Bauhaus pioneers in the United States. “White gods” he called it in his famous polemic, “From Bauhaus to our house” (With the Bauhaus life) from the year 1981. Walter Gropius, the chief ideologist, he christened the “silver Prince”. He came in 1937, after a brief stop in London, to New York. Pressure from the national socialists, the Bauhaus had been closed in Dessau in 1932 and 1933 in Berlin.
Whitney Museum of American Art, built by Marcel Breuer
In the United States rolled out the style pioneers from Germany to the red carpet. Gropius, chief utopians of the Bauhaus, was immediately appointed a Professor at the Harvard University, appointed a year later, the management of the architecture Department at the “Graduate Centre for Design”, the graduate school of design His assistant he brought with from Germany: Marcel Breuer, the non-auftrumpfte only, with its famous cantilever chairs, but in 1966, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York should build. The Americans call it “The Breuer Building”, the Breuer building.
International Stars of the avant-garde
The emigrants from Germany – they were already Stars before the New world ever reached. Already in 1929, Alfred Barr, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a frenetic speech at the Bauhaus. He wanted to get the ideas of the Bauhaus in American culture. Alfred Barr had previously been in Europe to make a picture of the new style.
“Silver Prince,” Walter Gropius fled from the Nazis in the USA
Convinced that the new movement in architecture, which has been observed since the early 1920s, was something Important, the Director of MoMa, along with the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson in 1930 and 1931, several trips to Europe to investigate the phenomenon. They came to the conclusion that “this contemporary style, which exists throughout the world, uniform and inclusive, not fragmentary and contradictory like so much of the first Generation of modern architects”, as stated in a catalog that appeared parallel to the first exhibition of the International Style, 1932, in New York.
In this book, Hitchcock and Johnson define the unity of this global construction by three criteria: the emphasis on pure volume, modular regularity and the avoidance of wearing the decorations. “The current style of the styles of the past”, they wrote. Also, color was frowned upon, instead of natural facade materials, and the tones of the metal profiles come “”.
The Pan American Building was designed by Walter Gropius in 1960
With the Work of architects from 29 countries, scale models, and 1 x 2-Meter photographs of the exhibition “Modern Architecture presented. The International Style” at New York’s MoMA a rule, presented on the right Who-is-Who of the Bauhaus: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, but also of architects and buildings from countries such as Mexico, the Netherlands or Hungary. Without the MoMA exhibition of 1932, had it not been for the Bauhaus exiles is certainly not so easy to have so easily in the US.
A lot of advertising for the Bauhaus
Barr, Hitchcock and Johnson were the First to have identified the style of the New building so categorically and defined. And have found a suitable, universal name for it. Thus, the Bauhaus exiles quickly found a new home in the USA: Famous students such as Andreas Feininger, Herbert Bayer and Xanti Schawinsky were even in the American pavilion at the 1939 world’s fair in New York exhibit and the USA represent.
For your fame of Gropius and his colleagues had taken care of itself. A true Propaganda machine: gave radio interviews, wrote Manifestos, published lot of texts about their visions. The first evidence of its New building, leaving behind Gropius and Breuer in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where they established themselves in the immediate neighborhood of small villas with a flat roof and ribbon Windows. Both “most of the houses in the American style,” should be examples for potential customers. In the 1950s, the prompt queue: Gropius Pan American World Airlines Building in New York, and countless other office built high-rise buildings.
The carpentry workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar
Not only in New York, but also in other cities of the United States, the Bauhaus idea was surprisingly fast.
New Bauhaus in Chicago
Chicago-Nagy in 1937, was built under the direction of Laszlo Moholy-the “New Bauhaus,” the new Bauhaus. Exactly like the model in Dessau, the Hungarian-established a synthesis of the arts: There was also a preliminary course – true to the Bauhaus program in Dessau, should attune the student to the new Learning and in the drawing basics. In addition to a permanent staff with guest lecturers from the University of Chicago taught the necessary basics of physics, biology, and philosophy. After a year, the New Bauhaus had to be closed for financial reasons.
Better it happened to the painter Josef Albers. He emigrated in 1933 with his wife Anni to the U.S. and got a call to the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Among his most famous students of the Pop-Art artist Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning and Kenneth Noland. His wife, Anni Albers designed the weaving pattern for the industry and sold their hand-woven abstract wall paintings to wealthy private clients.
Dream of a skyscraper
Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments created 1949-51 in Chicago
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the most important architects of the 20th century. Century and the third Bauhaus Director in Dessau, came in 1938, as a conductor to the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago. There, he held the Bauhaus-ideas on life: his pupils learned to work for less result-oriented. In his “Visual training”course, you should learn an understanding of materiality and structure. Early on, Mies van der Rohe’s high-rise buildings interested and participated already in 1920/1921 the first competition for a skyscraper. A highlight was the establishment of the Lake Shore Towers in Chicago – a structure made of glass façade and steel structure. Thus, he realized a dream he would have been able to achieve in Germany. Even more: a short time later, Mies van der Rohe’s architecture was the epitome of modern architecture in the United States. Tom Wolfe had, however, only ridicule left: Mies van der Rohe’s buildings were nothing more than “boxes of glass and steel”.