Walter Gropius was the most admired character, who had founded in 1919 the Bauhaus, school of decorative art and architecture.
A true center of art, a true intellectual commune, almost a spiritual movement. At that time Gropius was 36 years old, a slender physique, courteous and always dressed in the typically German style of the time.
The painter Paul Klee he called it,"Silver Prince"
Josef Albers, a painter, held a course at the Bauhaus and brought a bundle of newspapers to the classroom every day inviting the students to create works of art. And that's how in the next lesson he found the classroom full of airplanes, boats, castles of cards and fantastic objects, all made with written pages that almost narrated their story. But what most excited him was that work created only with a folding of the newspaper, a curtain: the only true work of art in paper. While everything else could also be turned into stone or metal.
The Bauhaus style was born from some assumptions, the first that architecture was created for the workers, that is to give them houses suited to their needs; according to which this architecture repudiated everything that belonged to the bourgeoisie. And it didn't take long to see buildings built with honest materials such as concrete, wood, steel or glass.
A true race towards functionalism which, however, did not always mean functionality. For example, the roofs were no longer to be sloping. With noble cornices representing bourgeois residences, but they had to be flat and without cornices or sumptuous gutters. Far from functional in cities like Berlin or Rotterdam, where it snowed a lot, the snow got stuck on the roof.
Even the false facades and the use of precious materials had to disappear in this new architecture, while the internal structure had to be expressed on the outside of the building and without ornaments; visible from the walls of steel and glass.
In 1937 the Silver Prince went to the United States having fled with the advent of Nazism, and with him Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was director of the Bauhaus as early as 1930.
Gropius was appointed dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Harvard University. While Mies became director of the Faculty of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
In reality all the projects that were elaborated by the teaching of this artistic movement were identical
Everyone designed a box of glass, steel and concrete, which was called "Yale box”; in reference to the course of the Yale University of New Haven in Connecticut.
The same Frank Lloyd Wright he was baffled by the unedifying results, to the point that Miles himself called Wright a genius who deserved credit for having opened his eyes to European architects.
The same Louis Khan was commissioned to design an extension of the Yale University art gallery, the result was a project for a glass box, where the only details highlighted on a flat surface were five rows of brown-colored vitrified bricks. It could have looked like a garage, in fact the university administrators were baffled, but they gave in.
From 1928 to 1935 Wright built two buildings and in 1936 he built the House on the Waterfall, a concrete slab residence anchored in rock and suspended over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania highlands. We also owe him the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Here is an architecture that forbids all exuberance and grandeur becomes the new construction of the workers…but born from the rubble of Europe; it thus became a style taken as a model for museums, apartments for the rich, and headquarters of large companies: less so than for the homes of workers.
But why live in buildings that look more like factories than residences? Fashion, simply be fashionable!
Like all art…which becomes important when it becomes fashionable
In St. Louis, Missouri, a housing development for workers opened in 1955. But they had long since moved to the suburbs, so the complex was occupied by immigrants who had just arrived from the countryside. And in each floor of this complex there were covered passages corresponding to the principles of the French Le Corbusier, but lacked more private places, because everything took place in airy "airways".
So people left and millions of dollars were spent trying to make the Pruitt-Igor, this is his name. In 1972 the municipality had the three central buildings demolished with dynamite.
However, the Bauhaus marked a model of modernity that influenced even later creativity in search of openness to the world, without stages built on luxury and, because… after all, life is really a glass box.
