There Is No True "Bauhaus City," But Bauhaus Did Shape Our Urban Space | QDaily Business History

Since the International Style was first proposed, it has grown ever more common for a single architectural and urban form to win admirers across the globe. The more important question is: who gets to define the International Style?

If not for the Industrial Revolution, our cities would never have changed so thoroughly.

In the past, city-building began from the square and the streetscape. Industrial growth brought population booms, and with them pollution, overcrowding, and crime. For urban planners and designers, more pressing and more practical concerns emerged: transportation, functional zoning, and mass working-class housing.

The two world wars accelerated the change. Postwar reconstruction — and the wish to wipe the slate clean — conspired to produce a single outcome: the modern city we live in today. In some places, no artillery was needed; a regional war of independence achieved a similar "start from scratch" effect, the sort of thing people often invoke when they talk about the Bauhaus.

Looking for Bauhaus architecture in the strict sense within a modern city is hard and ultimately pointless. Does a truly distinct Bauhaus architecture — or a distinctly Bauhaus kind of urban planning — really exist, separate from modernism in the broad sense? Architectural historians find the question a headache too. They sometimes draw distinctions with terms like "classical Bauhaus" and "late modern style," though the accuracy of those labels remains in doubt.

The architecture columnist Tom Wolfe had a sweeping, sardonic description of his own: he called the houses that Bauhaus architects built "white boxes" — square blocks of reinforced concrete, white facades, occasionally varied with a touch of sandy brick. That was how it began, perhaps. The Bauhaus school Walter Gropius designed in 1925 was like this; so was Le Corbusier's 1929 Villa Savoye ("a white box raised on pilotis").

There does seem to be one city that could genuinely be called a "Bauhaus city" — Tel Aviv, Israel. Founded in 1909, it is widely held to have the world's largest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings: more than 4,000, most built in the 1930s, by architects of whom 19 had studied at the Bauhaus school. Tel Aviv even has a Bauhaus museum in the white-box mold.

But a single glance shows that the "White City" looks nothing like the urban fabric we know today:

1) There are no high-density skyscrapers — most buildings in the White City are only 2 to 4 stories tall, and none covers much ground.

2) There is no glass curtain wall.

3) There are no elevated expressways to ease urban congestion.

The White City reads more like a piece of Bauhaus "cultural heritage." People do live there, yet it resembles nothing so much as the 1927 housing exhibition in Stuttgart — a model workers' housing estate that Mies van der Rohe organized on commission from the Stuttgart city government. The White City is like a new exhibition ground that Bauhaus architects found in Asia some years later.

So what, exactly, is a Bauhaus city?

In 1925, Gropius published International Architecture. In it, he championed an architecture unbound by the particular conditions of a given site. He urged architects to shed the limits of location, climate, local character, and historical tradition in their designs, and not to dilute the discipline of a strictly rational process. No particular stylistic description, no concrete design guidelines, no explicit workers' housing program — what Gropius proposed was a uniformly monotonous urban aesthetic. At the time, "monotonous" was not a problem but an advanced and efficient solution. In 1932, two architecture curators at MoMA distilled this aesthetic into the "International Style." Its followers would form a chorus of architects in competitive imitation — what Tom Wolfe called the "compound." Who wouldn't want to be international? And what could be more persuasive than an "international" style? This is the city as we see it today, and the designers who made it.

In 1950s America — where the founding Bauhaus architects first made their names — this style happened to mean "boxes of glass, steel, and concrete." Students at the Yale School of Architecture soon grasped the problem. "Nobody can design anything else; it's all Yale boxes." The bulletin boards filled up with caricatures of Yale boxes, showing these boxes set down in the desert and in the city as utterly interchangeable.

"But nothing has changed … The reason is that now all of America's architecture students are living in these boxes, the very same boxes that European compound architects locked themselves inside twenty years ago."

How Bauhaus Came to America

In 1913, the "International Exhibition of Modern Art" at the New York Armory startled Americans, and some quickly drew the conclusion: the new art was in Europe. American tycoons and their wives saw Cubist and Fauvist paintings in Europe and returned to New York to found the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA. MoMA also became a powerful promoter of International Style architecture in the United States.

Tom Wolfe believed America's "colonial mentality" was at work — that this was why the modernist style championed by the Bauhaus and European architects had grown so popular. He was displeased. It gave his writing of From Bauhaus to Our House its caustic, needling edge. But Wolfe pointed to some important facts.

Academia was the first territory to fall. Do not underestimate the influence of the academy, any more than you would underestimate the power of the authorities. Architecture is, after all, not a fully market-driven profession, anywhere in the world. Bauhaus architects settled into American architecture schools one by one — Gropius moved to the United States in 1937 and became chair of Harvard's Department of Architecture; Mies van der Rohe also came to America that year, to teach at the Illinois Institute of Technology — and in doing so transformed the prevailing Beaux-Arts tradition. They began to take on campus commissions. After Mies was appointed head of IIT's architecture department and chief architect, he designed the entire campus in 1937 (no competitive tender required) — twenty-one buildings in all. It was the Depression, and architects were desperate for work.

These buildings were all squat boxes, no longer imitating the classical style of English universities. But shouldn't academia be ahead of the curve? And Europe was the curve. Later, Le Corbusier designed the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard — a gray box planted among a cluster of old buildings, strikingly out of place. "But there are those who believe that taking on tradition, challenging it, is itself an important part of education. Harvard deserves credit for being willing to take that risk in this belief." So wrote Tong Jun in New Architecture and Its Currents.

This kind of building later left campus and entered circulation — becoming museums, apartment blocks, corporate headquarters, city halls. On one hand, of course, it was a matter of money. The new construction used reinforced-concrete technology, which had advanced fast since 1916, and built quicker; and it carried no ornament — not just flat roofs, but no arches, not even a molding. The consequences were enormous. Wolfe noted that ornamental contracting firms were driven to the brink of bankruptcy as a result. In the heyday of decoration and classical style, such a firm might have employed a thousand copperworkers, marble cutters, molding craftsmen, and designers.

"These days, any other style costs too much!" — this cliché was heard everywhere. But Wolfe believed that if you actually ran the numbers, it was "not too much — just a bit more."

What mattered was aesthetics. Once an aesthetic superiority takes hold, it is irresistible. Everyone chased the modern-style house. Design review meetings always had a few Bauhaus-aligned architects in the room. Add to that the early-twentieth-century model of teamwork — developers, planners, architects, landscape architects, builders, and public administrators — which had gradually dissolved as projects grew scarce. In the economic recovery after the Second World War, decision-makers became more autocratic still.

In the early days, the two camps were evenly matched in America. At the Chicago World's Fair, classical style still dominated the proposals. "Some municipal authorities would go so far as to ban the building of modern-style housing, while banks were notorious for refusing to issue mortgages on such properties."

What happened next was this: America's existing commercial skyscrapers merged miraculously with the European import of workers' housing. The Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, stood close to 210 meters — the tallest building in the world at the time. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, rose 400 meters across 85 floors. But suddenly everything beyond the rectangular box seemed superfluous — "the stainless-steel gargoyles on the Chrysler Building," "the bizarre zeppelin mooring mast atop the Empire State Building" — as the translator's preface to The International Style put it.

Glass, and Towers

Le Corbusier came to New York for the first time in 1935, and in the eyes of both Wolfe and Rem Koolhaas, his state of mind was deeply mixed. Corbusier had heard that New York was "a city of magical skyscrapers," and the energy of the American economy led him to believe that here, at last, his skyscraper vision could be realized. Yet in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune, Corbusier said Manhattan's skyscrapers were too small, too close together. The buildings weren't tall enough; though numerous, if you spread New York flat it would average out to just four stories.

By organizing conventions, publishing manifestos, and competing relentlessly for commissions, the French-Swiss architect had by this point become a prominent figure. His relations with the Bauhaus architects were cordial; he sometimes joined Gropius in bodies such as the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and similar groups (they had worked together as early as 1910 at Peter Behrens's office in Berlin) and won a large following. More often, though, Corbusier worked alone.

When Corbusier presented his checkerboard plan of eighteen 60-story skyscrapers — known as the Plan Voisin — at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Modern Industries, people had not yet read any particularly striking high-rise theory from the Bauhaus architects. Gropius had made some forays, but they were essentially advanced versions of his workers' housing schemes (Corbusier also had designs for collective housing). Before coming to America in 1930, Gropius had given a lecture in Belgium titled "Low, Medium, or High-Rise Buildings," arguing that high-rise apartment blocks could "provide more open space, sunlight, air, and informal chances to meet" and were thus suited to low-income residents, while villas on the city's outskirts suited the wealthy.

This welfare-style housing was carried out in the United States for a time, but by the 1970s it had collapsed. The most emblematic event came in 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis was demolished by implosion after falling into disuse. The project's architect was Minoru Yamasaki, a student of Mies. What remained was another building Yamasaki designed that same year — the World Trade Center, a commercial tower that stood until it was destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Koolhaas saw the difference between these towers. In Delirious New York, he observed that Corbusier's skyscraper proposals "meant only business." Corbusier was not interested in culture: "The glass walls of his horizontal skyscraper enclosed a complete cultural void." In the Plan Voisin, the skyscrapers were commercial and industrial buildings "exclusively for a cohort of executives running enterprises," entirely sheathed in glass curtain walls. As for its overarching vision — "the program Europeans set for the true machine age is banally effective: 'to be able to open your eyes and see sky, to live near a tree, next to a lawn,' 'to go directly from one skyscraper to another.' In the 'fundamental joys' of sunlight, space, and vegetation, daily life will return to an eternal sameness."

For a time, it seemed as if all the hatred and suspicion people felt toward new architecture, modern architecture, and Bauhaus-style architecture had gathered around Corbusier's person. Whether in America or the Soviet Union, Europe or Asia and Africa, his proposals rarely won approval. Yet the United Nations headquarters complex that Wallace Harrison completed in 1950 bore a close resemblance to the sketch Corbusier had prepared in 1947. This sort of thing happened often. In fact, America built a great many modern-style high-rises during this period.

Even Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a 528-story state office building on the Chicago lakefront — the so-called "Mile-High Illinois." He declared: "Today, no one can build this building. In the future, no one will be able to not build it." Chicago later built the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower.

America: The Template for the International Style

Since the International Style was first proposed, it has grown ever more common for a single architectural and urban form to win admirers across the globe.

The more important question is: who gets to define the International Style? Witold Rybczynski put it plainly in City Life — "keeping up with the Joneses." The Joneses, in this case, are the wealthy neighbors you are always watching. The International Style is, of course, whatever is fashionable in prosperous neighboring nations and stylish metropolises — just copy it.

So in the second half of the twentieth century, cities around the world set out to replicate a New York, a Chicago, or a Detroit. Wholesale copying was impossible — everyone understood that what a city finally looks like is the product of complex forces — but there were shortcuts: you could at least imitate the most conspicuous part, the showpiece landmark building. "Nothing catches the eye as a symbol of a city more than a commercial skyscraper," Rybczynski wrote in City Life. "The public is fascinated by the so-called important or iconic building, the attention-getting structure designed by a star architect."

The method, then, was to hire the disciples of Mies, Gropius, and Corbusier.

Marcel Breuer taught at Harvard alongside Gropius and produced Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, and I. M. Pei. Niemeyer, Corbusier's Brazilian apprentice, used Corbusier's sketch to design a Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio de Janeiro: its ground floor raised on pilotis, its east and west faces smooth matchbox gables, its north facade covered in brise-soleils. The sketch was Corbusier's. In Brazil's new capital, Brasília, Niemeyer oversaw the architectural design of the entire city, including the high-rise parliamentary offices for both houses of the legislature and the Presidential Palace. In Tokyo, the National Museum of Western Art invited Corbusier to produce the architectural drawings, which were then handed to his Japanese disciples Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakakura (who had gone to Paris between 1927 and 1929 to study and work at Corbusier's studio) to supervise construction in Tokyo; it was completed in 1959. Breuer's student I. M. Pei designed Place Ville Marie in Montreal in 1963.

"The result is that architecture and cities rooted in modernism — especially those Asian and Middle Eastern cities with shallower historical roots — present a uniform appearance to the world, like mass-produced industrial goods off an assembly line." The postwar Japanese architect Toyo Ito made this observation in Rebuilding Architecture in Japan, calling it deeply regrettable. He singled out Hong Kong, Dubai, and Jakarta. Yet to others, Hong Kong is precisely the positive example of a city that has kept its distinctive character and historical texture. In certain districts it looks like a copy of Manhattan; turn a corner and it is something else entirely.

An imprecise but interesting observation: the spread of Bauhaus-style or modernist architecture has typically coincided with the period just before a region's per capita GDP reaches ten thousand US dollars.

Accounting for exchange rates and inflation, the United States first reached a per capita GDP of ten thousand dollars in 1913; after the First World War and a long postwar Depression, it has stayed above that threshold continuously since 1936. This is also the period when America began building large numbers of modern high-rises. West Berlin's postwar reconstruction was Bauhaus in character. Though Stalin disliked modern architecture, after his death in 1953 East Berlin also adopted a complete urban-modernization agenda — and the planned economy made planners' decisions even more sweeping. Accounting for exchange rates and inflation, Germany's per capita GDP passed ten thousand dollars in 1959.

None of this is surprising. The demands of postwar reconstruction and urban renewal drove the construction industry, and this kind of infrastructure investment has always been the most effective way to stimulate large leaps in GDP. Postwar austerity further encouraged clean, bold, and simple modernist forms with unadorned surfaces. "Box" architecture was, without question, fast and cheap.

In the 1950s, Japan expanded its urban footprint outward, building large residential communities in what were then the suburbs — called danchi — for middle-class families. Between 1955 and 1960, Japan built 140,000 such units at home. Their structure was standardized; their external look was like the Unité d'Habitation that Corbusier designed in Marseille in 1952. In 1960, before a visit to the United States, the Emperor and Empress made a special trip to inspect a danchi on the outskirts of Tokyo. "Keeping up with the Joneses" appears to have worked — Japan's per capita GDP passed ten thousand dollars in 1962.

Similarly, Hong Kong's per capita GDP passed ten thousand dollars in 1976; just before that, construction began on Taikoo Shing — a large mixed-use complex housing 45,000 residents across 10,000 residential units. Taikoo Shing was "designed for the middle class" and would gradually change people's preference for single-family homes. As for Asia's tallest skyscraper at the time, the Bank of China Tower designed by I. M. Pei, it did not officially open until 1990 — by which point architectural fashion had shifted entirely.

I. M. Pei designed the OCBC Centre in Singapore in 1976; three years later, Singapore's per capita GDP passed ten thousand dollars. Although the OCBC Centre has a distinctive curved form, this 52-story building is three "boxes" stacked vertically. In Singapore, International Style architecture was fashionable around the 1970s, at the height of the city's urban renewal, and such buildings appeared everywhere on the island. It was not only commercial skyscrapers — prewar affordable housing had typically been four-story Art Deco apartment buildings, but postwar public housing also became modern-style high-rises.

In some places, this built form arrived too soon. In 1950, following the partition of India and Pakistan, India needed to build a modern new city for the Punjab region. They called on Le Corbusier. Corbusier designed a multi-tiered road network, laying out the city along streets for fast, medium, and slow traffic. The Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, who had worked early in his career at Corbusier's studio, said this was not a design suited to India — India had "not yet reached that stage of civilization dominated by traffic."

The "Betrayal" of Bauhaus

The problems with the International Style surfaced early. The trouble was not merely the aesthetic monotony, nor the question of which specific style the International Style actually referred to — the problem was, as Witold Rybczynski put it, "the sheer volume of mistaken imitation from city to city."

In the race to replicate, the Bauhaus style — first celebrated for its functionalism — ended up a form of expressionism. Wolfe put it well: "Mies's box expresses just one idea: here is modern architecture. That makes it Expressionism, doesn't it? Exaggeration, novelty, idiosyncrasy." And this tendency was already present in Mies van der Rohe's own designs. He was often criticized for making "function serve form" rather than the original Bauhaus principle of "form following function."

This was especially true in an age when technology had not yet matured. The John Hancock Tower, the 60-story insurance company office building I. M. Pei designed in Boston in 1968, was sheathed entirely in glass curtain walls, realizing Mies van der Rohe's "glass-curtain-wall building" vision from years before. Critics said the design made the building "seem to exist and not exist at once — floating, even vanishing; the clean form appears weightless, almost as light as daylight itself." But severe construction problems emerged in the 1970s.

So it was that even without postwar austerity, the spare style carried on — and in the years around the 1970s, when modernist architecture was at its most fashionable, even the most expensive buildings were built in the modernist idiom.

A turn came swiftly. By the 1980s and 1990s, the brief architects received had become: "Please, no flat roofs." If they could meet the request, the satisfied response was: "Now that's a house." The American cities that saw the most dramatic population growth in the second half of the twentieth century also did not grow vertically — they spread horizontally, as Wright had described: the "Broadacre City."

In the 1970s, high-rise apartment blocks had become a problem in the United States. "Municipal housing authorities lacked the funds for landscaping, for maintaining public housing, or for providing proper management; when the federal government passed legislation banning tenant screening, public housing projects quickly became sites of concentrated poverty and social dysfunction … Because repairs to the apartment buildings were put off indefinitely, many dilapidated blocks stood empty. These buildings were barely twenty years old." (City Life)

The root cause could be traced to the 1950s: "The postwar euphoria led people to place enormous faith in 'innovation' and in any new idea, no matter how rough or untested — all seemed worth trying."

Gropius had made an error in judgment — not in his vision of high-rise workers' dormitories, but in his advocacy of an architecture that shed "the limits of location, climate, local character, and historical tradition."

The Bauhaus and early International Style architects later changed to varying degrees. Some turned to form-making: curves, ornament; others used local materials. Alvar Aalto's Baker House dormitory at MIT, designed in 1947, has a very rectilinear cross-section and is modernist in style, yet its overall form is a serpentine curve. The apartment block in Bremen, West Germany, is similar.

When Le Corbusier launched the Athens Charter in 1933, he proposed four urban functions (housing, work, transportation, and culture) and the raw materials of city-making (sunlight, space, greenery, steel, and concrete). Critics had already pointed out at the time that the charter ignored the historical dimension of cities and the question of how to respond to rapid population growth. When Corbusier was designing the Palace of Justice in Chandigarh, India, in 1951, he told local Indian architects, "Don't copy Western models; be faithful to your local culture and building materials." But at the very height of modernist fashion, Tong Jun noted, it "had no visible influence on the locality."

In 1982, Philip Johnson — a follower of both Mies and Breuer — designed the AT&T Building (now 550 Madison Avenue) in New York: vertical piers on the outer face of the glazed floors, with a Chippendale pediment at the top. What lay beyond the "box" was no longer superfluous.

Another architect who reconsidered the International Style and the academy was Robert Venturi. "The time has come to take architecture out of the university — out of the compound — and make it more accessible, more comfortable, more able to move ordinary people; to bring it down from the level of theory into eclecticism, dissonance, and the richness of real life."

Today, cities are being claimed by two new architectural forms. One might tentatively be called postmodernism: using computer technology and economical thin-shell and space-frame structures to produce shapes that are more novel, more structurally improbable. The other uses local materials and historicist forms. Some cities have been theatrically split into new districts and old — showcasing both. Take Montpellier, in southern France. The Antigone district, designed in the 1980s and located east of the city center, is a neoclassical quarter built around large plazas. In the new district, alongside an industrial-looking city hall, other municipal offices operate from a futurist building designed by Zaha Hadid.

For the latter form, it sometimes springs from an intellectual architect's reflection on the International Style and on globalization.

After years of white-box dominance, enthusiasm for historical architecture is coming back. In a 2007 opinion poll asking Americans to name their favorite buildings, those ranking highest included the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Supreme Court, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Chicago Tribune Tower — all completed between 1925 and 1943.

The devotees of Bauhaus shaped the architectural style of the modern city with their bare hands, and yet they also ensured that the styles before them were preserved — more vividly than ever — in the historical record.

Cover image from Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash, Jason Leung on Unsplash