Whenever I go to the German-speaking world, I'm struck by the passion there for cluttering up all domestic architecture and interiors with little bits of handicraft and decorative gee-gaws, heart-shaped wherever possible. I'd always imagined this frilly, homespun, 'traditional' aesthetic was something deeply ingrained in the warp and/or weft of the German-speaking soul. Then I heard an architecture critic called Jonathan Glancey describe the reaction of people given houses in the one and only pure-Bauhaus housing project to be erected. This is what he said:
"When the Bauhaus did actually design some houses, famously, at, I think it's the Torten estate in Dessau - that is mass produced concrete houses, 334 of them; they were rushed up in prefabricated concrete - almost instantly the residents started customising them."
Now I wonder whether in fact the frilly, homespun, 'traditional' German aesthetic is really just a 'customising' reaction to the austerity of the Bauhaus.
I agree there's definitely a battle in the German soul between love and hatred of clutter. Australia's most famous proponent of the Bauhaus, Harry Seidler - Austrian by birth - was famously insistent that those who occupied his domestic dwellings had to follow his rules about minimalist furniture, no clutter etc. This seems to have been one of the many areas in which he unsuccessfully tried to bend human taste and behaviour. Despite being lionised by fellow architects, his brutalist buildings remain unloved and even hated, e.g. Blues Point Tower in Sydney. He never understood Australians' growing love affair not with modern architecture but with the country's verandah-ed colonial and early 20th century architecture - of which he advocated mass demolition. In Canberra his concrete, wind-swept Edmund Barton Building required the demolition of the city's original and rather charming National Library: https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/334
ReplyDeleteNo doubt he thought its loss represented progress.
I met his biographer in Sydney once-she seemed to believe that Seidler's rejection of the architecture of former eras was a result of his rejection of the world which had destroyed his family, murdered by the Nazis
DeleteAdvocating the destruction of nice old Australian architecture because of an anti-Nazi impulse is obviously just daft and risks giving anti-Nazism a bad name. One thing that the Bauhaus shared with Hitler's architect Albert Speer (and the communists, for that matter) was the ambition of completely sweeping away the past. None succeeded - though Ceausescu in Bucharest was well on his way to achieving that aim when his efforts were mercifully interrupted.
ReplyDeleteNot nearly soon enough. He had such a dreadful bogan taste for bogus grandeur (is that where bogan comes from, by the way - a reworking of bogus?? No, probably not, or not entirely)
Delete