|
| |
Walter Gropius's Twentieth-Century Legacy to Architecture, Style and Social Consciousness
From: Columbia University
| By:
|
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 One of the most celebrated architects and teachers of the twentieth century, the German-born architect Walter Adolph Gropius (1883-1969) firmly believed that architects should focus not only on design but also on the community and the environment. He embraced the use of new materials, new technology and bold designs to erect elegant, pure structures.
Some of his best-known works include the Bauhaus School and faculty buildings in Dessau, Germany, the Fagus Works Shoe Factory in Alfeld, Germany, the Graduate Center at Harvard University, the Pan Am buildings in New York City and the Kennedy Federal Building in Boston. His New England home is also a well-known Massachusetts landmark.
This memoir, part of Columbia University's oral-history archive, is excerpted from the address Gropius (above) gave on March 21, 1961, when he received the doctor of humane letters degree from Columbia. It was part of a celebration of modern architects, sponsored by the Columbia School of Architecture. |
 | |
| Walter Gropius describes his design process. | |
 should like to talk about the ambiguous position of the architect in his relation to society and about his double role as a citizen and a professional. I want to point out why he, armed to the teeth with technical intricacies, design theories and philosophical arguments, so rarely succeeds in pulling his weight in the realm of public domain where decisions are made which vitally affect his interests. Since popular opinion holds him responsible for the condition our cities, towns and our countryside have gotten into, I would like to examine where exactly he stands in this respect and which avenues of action are open to him to broaden his influence. I would like to add also my reactions to certain "rumbles" in the architectural profession, which have interested me as much as they have baffled me. Since architects possess in general a sensitive, built-in thermometer, which registers the crisis and doubts, enthusiasms and fancies of their contemporaries, we should listen to the notes of misgiving, warning or satisfaction emerging from their ranks. |
Confusion and chaos
All reports, made lately, by architects and educators on the state of architecture in the '60s were dominated by two words: confusion and chaos. It seems to them that the inherent tendencies of an architecture of the twentieth century, as they were born 50 years or so ago and appeared then as a deeply felt, indivisible entity to their initiators, have been exploded into so many fractions that it becomes difficult to draw them together to coherence again. |
Technical innovations, first greeted as delightful new means-to-an-end, were seized separately and set against each other as ends in themselves; personal methods of approach were hardened into hostile dogmas; a new awareness of our relationship to the past was distorted into a revivalist spirit; our financial affluence was mistaken for a free ticket into social irresponsibility and art-for-art's-sake mentality; our young people felt bewildered rather than inspired by the wealth of means at their disposal. They were either trying to head for safe corners with limited objectives or succumbing to a frivolous application of changing patterns of "styling" or "mood" architecture. In short, we are supposed to have lost direction, confidence, reverence, and everything goes. |
When trying to take a stand, I would like first of all to extricate myself from the verbal jungle we have gotten ourselves into. What, actually, is chaos? One of Webster's definitions is: "A state of things in which chance is supreme." Well, those of us who welcome "chaoticism" may take comfort from the fact that the ancient Greeks considered Chaos to be the oldest god of all time. |
Personally I do not feel too fearful of this god, who returns periodically to stir up things on earth, because never in my life span has the architectural mission looked any less dangerous, less difficult and chaotic to me as it does now. It is true, in the beginning of the struggle the battle lines were drawn more clearly, but the fight was essentially the same: the coming to terms of a romantically oriented, jealously individualized architectural profession with the realities of the twentieth century. It seems to me that the specter of confusion is haunting mostly those who, for a short while, thought they had won all the battles and found all the answers; those who have come by their inheritance too easily, who have forgotten the great goals set at the beginning and find now their equilibrium upset by new developments in the social and technical field. |
But let me examine the meaning of the word "chaos" more closely in all its aspects. |
With our tremendously accelerated communication system, it has become quite easy today for people in all corners of the world to reiterate the most advanced ideas verbally while being actually unable to catch up with themselves in this respect emotionally. Therefore we see all around us an astonishing discrepancy between thought and action. Our verbal glibness often obscures the real obstacles in our path, which cannot be sidestepped by brilliant and diverting oratory. It also creates too rosy an impression of the actual influence architects are permitted to take in the shaping of our larger living spaces. |
Whether a conscientious and dedicated architect of today resolves his personal design problem in this or that way is, unfortunately, less decisive for the general looks of our surroundings than we are fond of believing. His contribution is simply swallowed up in the featureless growth that covers the acres of our expanding cities. |
In the last 20 years the US has seen the emergence of an unusual number of gifted architects who have managed to spread interest and admiration among designers in other countries. But when the curious arrived at our shores to see the new creations for themselves they were overwhelmed by the increase in general ugliness that hit their eyes before they had even a chance to find the objects of their interest in the vast, amorphous display. It is here where chaos reigns supreme, it is the absence of organic coherence in the total picture, which causes the disappointment, and not the dilemma between different individual approaches to design. |
Human trends and technical means
Having been in the cross-currents of the architectural development for over half a century now, I find that an architect who wants to help mold the evolutionary forces of his time instead of letting himself be overcome by them must distinguish between two sets of components which are apt to influence and direct his work. The first one consists of the human trends, which gradually move a society toward new patterns of living; the second consists of the contemporary technical means and the individual choices of form expression, which help these trends to take shape. It is imperative never to lose sight of the first while getting embroiled with the second, because the architect is otherwise in danger of losing himself in the design of technical stunts or in personal mannerisms. |
The potentialities of the new technical means fascinated my generation just as much as it does the architect of today, but at the beginning of our movement stood an idea, not an obsession with specific forms and techniques. The activities of life itself were under scrutiny. How to dwell, how to work, move, relax, how to create a life-giving environment for our changed society, this was what occupied our minds. Of course we went about the realization of such aims in very different ways, but I do not see why we naively believe that there is always only one perfect answer to a problem. There are of course many technical and form approaches to the same task, and any one of them may be successful if they are well suited to the purpose of the building, to the temperament of the architect, and if they are used with discrimination in their given environment. |
The great technical inventions and social developments of the last hundred years which set off such a stream of changes in our way of living and producing gradually established new habits, new standards, new preferences which have come to represent the unifying trends in today's general picture. Beginning with the discovery of the Bessemer steel and of Monier's reinforced concrete which freed architecture of the supporting, solid wall and presented it with virtually limitless possibilities for flexible planning, there has been a steady movement toward a less rigid, less encumbered style of living and building. |
The skeleton structures enabled us to introduce the large window opening and the marvel of the glass curtain wall--today misused and therefore discredited--which transformed the rigid, compartmental character of buildings into a transparent "fluid" one. This, in turn, gave birth to a totally new dynamic indoor-outdoor relationship, which has encouraged the evolution of industrial prefabrication methods, which have, by now, taken over a large part of our building process for the future. The common characteristics, which clearly emerged from all these innovations, are: an increase in flexibility and mobility; a new indoor-outdoor relationship; a bolder and lighter, less earthbound architectural appearance. |
These are the constituent elements of today's architectural imagery, and an architect can disregard them only at his peril. If related to a background of meaningful planning, they would reveal diversity, not chaos. |
Selling ourselves short
I cannot accept, therefore, the verdict of the critics that the architectural profession as such is to blame for the disjointed pattern of our cities and for the formless urban sprawl that creeps over our countryside. As we well know, the architect and planner has almost never received a mandate from the people to draw up the best possible framework for a desirable way of life. All he usually gets is an individual commission for a limited objective from a client who wants to make his bid for a place in the sun. |
It is the people as a whole who have stopped thinking of what would constitute a better frame of life for them and who have, instead, learned to sell themselves short to a system of rapid turnover and minor creature comforts. It is the lack of a distinct and compelling goal rather than bad intentions of individuals that so often ruins attempts of a more comprehensive character to general planning and sacrifices them bit by bit to the conventional quick profit motive. |
And this is, of course, where we all come in. In our role as citizens we all share in the general unwillingness to live up to our best potential, in the lack of dedication to our acknowledged principles, in our lack of discipline toward the lures of complacency and of material abundance. |
Julian Huxley, the eminent biologist, warned recently that "sooner rather than later we must get away from a system based on artificially increasing the number of human wants and set about constructing one aimed at the qualitative satisfaction of real human needs, spiritual as well as material and physiological. This means abandoning the pernicious habit of evaluating every human project solely in terms of its utility...." |
Our cunning sales psychology in its unscrupulous misuse of our language has brought about such a distortion of truth, such a dissolution of decency and morality, not to speak of its planned wastefulness, that it is high time for the citizen to take to the barricades against this massive onslaught against the unwary. |
Naturally, the all-pervading sales mentality has also had its detrimental effect on the architecture of our time. Relentless advertising pressure for ever-changing, sensational design has discouraged any tendency to create a visually integrated environment because it tacitly expects from the designer to be different at all cost for competition's sake. The effect is disruptive and quite contrary to the desirable diversity of design, which would result naturally from the work of different personalities who are aware of their obligations to environmental integration. Here again we see that the forces which cause confusion and chaos originate from the excessive infatuation with the rewards of salesmanship which dominates modern life and which we can influence only in the role of human beings and democratic citizens, but hardly as professionals. |
I was somewhat startled, therefore, by a sentence in the recent AIA report on the state of the profession: "The total environment produced by architecture in the next 40 years can become greater than the Golden Age of Greece, surpass the glories of Rome and outshine the magnificence of Renaissance. This is possible provided the architect assumes again his historic role as Masterbuilder." |
Architect as Masterbuilder
How does this vision compare to the realities of the situation at hand? Don't we need to remember that such high points in history came about only when the skill and artistic inspiration of the architect and the artist were carried into action by the clear and unquestioned authority of those who felt themselves to be the rightful representatives of a whole people? |
The Greek pinnacle was reached by the courage and foresight of their leader Pericles, who pulled together all financial and artistic resources of the whole nation and its allies, including the military budget, to force the erection of the Parthenon. The Romans, spreading this Mediterranean heritage over the whole of the Roman Empire, set in their buildings monuments to the centralized power of their leaders. |
The Renaissance, after giving birth to fierce political rivalry, harnessed all secular and clerical powers, all craftsmen and artists for the glorification of the competing principalities. Wherever we look in history, we find that the rulers took no chances with the individual tastes and inclinations of the populace, but imposed strict patterns of behavior as well as a hierarchy of religious, civic and economic standards which dominated architectural and artistic expression. In Japan this even covered the proportionate size of all domestic architecture, which was strictly regulated according to birth, rank and occupation of the owner. |
All these systems have produced magnificent results in one period or another, but they have no roots anymore in our modern world. Even if some authoritative remnants are still around in the form of large corporations and institutions, this cannot conceal the fact that the architect and artist of the twentieth century has to face a completely new client and patron: the average citizen or his representative whose stature, opinion and influence is uncertain and difficult to define compared to the authoritarian lord of the past. As we have seen, this citizen, as of now, is not at all in the habit of extending his vision beyond his immediate business concerns, because we have neglected to educate him for his role of cultural arbiter. He repays this neglect by running loose, only here and there restricted by social ambitions from recklessly following his commercial interests. |
Though he is quite aware of the restrictions the law puts on his building activities, he is almost totally unaware of his potentialities to contribute something positive, socially and culturally, to the actual development, change and improvement of his environment. So far we are only trying to prevent him, by zoning laws, from committing the worst abuse, but I feel that unless we take the positive step of trying to mold him into the man of responsibility he must become, there will be little chance for the "Masterbuilder" ever to assume his comprehensive historic role as creator of cities again. |
Strengthening the creative spirit
Our modern society is still on trial where cultural integration is concerned. This certainly cannot be accomplished by handing out authoritative beauty formulas to an uncomprehending public, untrained to see, to perceive, to discriminate. A society such as ours which has conferred equal privileges on everybody will have to acknowledge its duty to activate the general responsiveness to spiritual and aesthetic values, to intensify the development of everybody's imaginative faculties. Only this can create the basis from which eventually the creative act of the artist can rise, not as an isolated phenomenon, ignored and rejected by the crowd, but firmly embedded in a network of public response and understanding. |
The only active influence which our society can take toward such a goal would be to see to it that our educational system for the next generation will develop in each child, from the beginning, a perceptive awareness, which intensifies his sense of form. Seeing more, he will comprehend more of what he sees and will learn to understand the positive and negative factors which influence the environment he finds himself in. Our present methods of education, which put a premium on accumulation of knowledge, have rarely reached out to include a training in creative habits of observing, seeing and shaping our surroundings. The apathy we meet in the adult citizen, who entertains only vague notions of wishing to get away from it all, can certainly be traced to this early failure of arousing his active interest in the improvement of his living area. |
Children should be introduced right from the start to the potentialities of their environment, to the physical and psychological laws that govern the visual world, and to the supreme enjoyment that comes from participating in the creative process of giving form to one's living space. Such experience, if continued in depth throughout the whole of the educational cycle, will never be forgotten and will prepare the adult to continue taking an informed interest in what happens around him. |
Recent research at the University of Chicago shows that "the [same] children seek out the safety and security of the 'known,' while the highly creative children seem to enjoy the risk and uncertainty of the 'unknown.' " We should strengthen this creative spirit, which is essentially one of nonconformist independent search. We must instill respect for it and create response to it on the broadest level, otherwise the common man stays below his potential and the uncommon man burns up his fireworks in isolation. |
The origins of the Bauhaus
My concern with the problem of drawing out the potential artist and of providing him with a stimulating educational climate and a chance to acquire a perfect technique prompted me over 40 years ago to create the Bauhaus School of Design. In opposition to the then prevailing trend of bringing up a student of design on the subjective recipes of his master, we tried to put him on a solid foundation by giving him objective principles of universal validity, derived from the laws of nature and the psychology of man. From this basis he was expected to develop his own individual design approach, independent of the personal one of his teacher. |
This novel method of education in design has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. The present generation is inclined to think of it as a rigid stylistic dogma of yesterday whose usefulness has come to an end, because its ideological and technical premises are now outdated. This view confuses a method of approach with the practical results obtained by it at a particular period of its application. |
The Bauhaus was not concerned with the formulation of time-bound, stylistic concepts, and its technical methods were not ends in themselves. It wanted to show how a multitude of individuals, willing to work concertedly but without losing their identity, could evolve a kinship of expression in their response to the challenges of the day. It wanted to give a basic demonstration on how to maintain unity in diversity, and it did this with the materials, techniques and form concepts germane to its time. It is its method of approach that was revolutionary, and I have not found yet any new system of education for design which puts the Bauhaus idea out of course. In fact, the present disenchantment with the doubtful results obtained from simply imitating highly personal design methods of this or that master without adding to their substance should give renewed emphasis to its principles. |
Teaching and practice
It would be most desirable if the initial work done by the Bauhaus were continued and expanded so that we would be able to draw on an ever-increasing common fund of objective knowledge, teachable to all age groups and furnishing the much-needed vocabulary with which individuals are free to compose their personal design poetry. If the capacity to focus and crystallize the tendencies of a period becomes dim, as it has in our time, the necessity of intensifying our efforts at coherence becomes ever more important. |
There are some vital centers in this country where such work is pursued with dedication, but their influence is still limited, and it is hard to find creative architects and artists who want to take on teaching positions besides their other work, because public opinion regards teaching as a mere backwater compared to the excitement and rewards of practical work. That the two must be combined if a healthy climate for the growing generation is to evolve remains an applauded theory rather than an actual accomplishment. |
I remember an experience I had myself years ago when, on the occasion of my 70th birthday, Time magazine commented on my career. After coming to this country, they said, I had been "content to teach only," as if this were, in itself, a minor occupation as compared to that of a practicing architect. Apart from the fact that the paper was misinformed--I had never given up my practice--it brought home to me again the realization that the profession of the teacher is looked upon in this country as a kind of refuge for those visionaries who cannot hold their own in the world of action and reality. Though admittedly there has been a shift in this view lately, it is still much too firmly established as to become uprooted. It remains a tremendous handicap for those who realize the importance of combining practice and teaching and want to make their contribution in both fields. |
Individual growth within cooperation
What, now, can be done by the individual practicing architect to promote a greater measure of cooperation between those groups who contribute to the development of our visible world? In spite of our partiality to "togetherness" this fashionable trend has accomplished little in our field since it lacks a distinct purpose, a discipline, a working method of its own. All these must be found before we get more and more lost to each other. |
I think we all agree that a relatedness of expression and a consolidation of trends cannot be consciously organized in a democracy, but springs from spontaneous group consciousness, from collective intuition, which brings our pragmatic requests and our spiritual desires into interplay. I have tried, since a long time, therefore, to give more incentive to such a state of mind by developing a spirit of voluntary teamwork among groups of architects. But my idea has become almost suspect since so many of my colleagues are still wedded to the nineteenth-century idea that individual genius can only work in splendid isolation. |
Just as our profession 50 years ago closed their eyes to the fact that the machine had irrefutably entered the building process, so now it is trying to cling to the conception of the architect as a self-sufficient, independent operator, who, with the help of a good staff and competent engineers, can solve any problem, and keep his artistic integrity intact. This, in my view, is an isolationist attitude, which will be unable to stem the tide of uncontrolled disorder engulfing our living spaces. It runs counter to the concept of Total Architecture, which is concerned with the whole of our environmental development and demands collaboration on the broadest basis. |
Our present casual way of solving problems of collaboration on large projects is simply to throw a few prominent architects together in the hope that five people will automatically produce more beauty than one. The result, as often as not, becomes an unrelated assemblage of individual architectural ideas, not an integrated whole of new and enriched values. It is obvious that we have to learn new and better ways of cooperation. |
In my personal experience, these call first of all for an unprejudiced state of mind, and for the firm belief that common thought and action is a precondition for cultural growth. Starting on this basis, we must strive to acquire the methods, the vocabulary, the habits of collaboration with which most architects are unfamiliar still. And this is not easy to accomplish. |
It is one thing to condition an individual for cooperation by making him conform; it is another altogether to make him keep his identity within a group of people while he is trying to find common ground with them. It is imperative, though, that we develop such techniques of collaboration to a high degree of refinement since it is our best guarantee of the protection of the individual against becoming a mere number and, at the same time, for the development of related expression rather than of pretentious individualism. |
There can be no doubt, of course, that the creative spark originates always with the individual, but while he works in close collaboration with others and is exposed to their stimulating and challenging critique, his own work matures more rapidly and never loses touch with the broader aspects which unite a team in a broader effort. |
Strengths of collaboration
Communication from person to person is at an all-time low today, I believe, in spite of--or because of--our tremendous technical means of communication, and most individuals are driven into shallow superficiality in all their relations with other people, including their own friends. But just as the airplane is no substitute for our legs, so personal contact between people of like interests cannot be replaced by the vast output of professional literature and information service because individual interpretation and exchange is still essential for our functioning as human beings. |
Our overextended receptive faculties need a respite so that greater concentration and intensification can take place, and I feel that a well-balanced team can help achieve just that. As we cannot inform ourselves simultaneously in all directions, a member of a team benefits from the different interests and attitudes of the other members during their collaborative meetings. The technical, social and economic data, gathered individually and then presented to the others, reaches them already humanized by personal interpretation. And, since all members of a team are apt to add their own different reactions, the new information is more easily seen in its proper perspective and its potential value. |
For the effectiveness of this kind of intimate teamwork, two preconditions are paramount: voluntarism, based on mutual respect and liking and exercise of individual leadership, and responsibility within the group. Without the first, collaboration is mere expediency; without the last it loses artistic integrity. To safeguard design-coherence-and-impact, the right of making final decisions must therefore be left to the one member who happens to be in charge of a specific job, even though he has previously received support and criticism from other members. |
Such principles of teamwork are easier explained than carried into practice because we all still arrive on the scene with our old habits of trying to best the other fellow to it. But I believe that a group of architects willing to give collaboration a chance will be rewarded by seeing their effectiveness strengthened and their influence on public opinion broadened. All teams so organized, I trust, will eventually act as ferments in our drive for cultural integration. |
The power of education to free creativity
Considering the reservoir of rich talent and the wealth of technical and financial resources available today, it would seem that this generation holds all the aces in the age-old game of creating architectural form synonymous for the ideas by which society lives. |
Only a magic catalyst seems to be needed to combine these forces and free them from isolation. I personally see this catalyst in the power of education; education to raise the expectations and demands a people take on their own form of living, education to waken and sharpen their latent capacities for creation and for cooperation. Creativity of the makers needs the response of all the users. |
I am convinced that a surprising amount of individual whimsy--yes, even aberration and downright ugliness--could be tolerated without causing serious harm, only the grand total design, the image a society should have of itself, would emerge clearly and unequivocally. What we admire in the achievements of city builders of the past is the fact that their work reveals so clearly the ultimate destination to which each individual feature was put as an organic part of the whole area. |
This was what made the city perform its functions well and gave the people a stimulating background for all their activities. How else can the marvel of 2 Piazza San Marco, this arch example of perfection, be explained? Not the work of a single master like the Piazza Saint Peter, we find instead that over a long period of growth a perfect balance was developed between the contributions of a number of architects, using many different materials and methods. They achieved this miracle because they never violated the main purpose of the general plan yet never forced uniformity of design. San Marco is an ideal illustration to my credo "unity in diversity," to the development of which, in our time, I can only hope to have made my personal contribution during a long life of search and discovery. |
I think that our design process is one of discarding, discarding, discarding. If you are a lively man, you have a lot of ideas, which come to you, how you could do it. And you have to look to it--is it useful? If not, away with it, and you stay with one or two things which seem to be the most important to you and the most individual to you. |
And then you take these--say, like a musician takes a melody, which has come to him, and gives it modulation and different speeds and tones all throughout his symphony. In a similar way I think we have to work in architecture, too--if we prefer certain technical or practical things with a certain result of form which comes out the fulfilling of these practical requirements, you consider that as the resulting form, and you use it again, but in different sizes and proportions and so on, that is the element which you will find consistently all throughout the whole thing. |
I found it as a teacher in Harvard perhaps the greatest difficulty to bring the younger men who want to come into the profession to a way of thinking which cannot be learned intellectually but only from doing it again and again. That is the thinking in three different directions simultaneously. |
You may have an idea, which is an economical idea, or you have an idea, which is a structural idea, for a building, or you have an aesthetic idea of a certain form, which is in your mind. The initial point may be either one of these three. Immediately the moment where you start designing, you have to think simultaneously in these three terms: the structure, the form, and the economy of what you are doing. And this thinking--this three-pronged approach--is a difficult one. It takes quite a while until you learn it, until you automatically come into checking up into the other two phases when you start with one. This is a very important thing. I really can't tell you. Try to train you that way--it helps enormously if you do. |
And of course in the background of that whole is what you are representing as a citizen of the world today, how much do you understand of the human being, how much do you understand of the politics as they are today, the whole setting--social setting--in which we are living. Because any building, whatever you do, whether it's a building for a profession or whether it's a dwelling or whether it's a university or a school building, you have to think from the human being using that instrument, building; and the human being, how he goes about and lives in that house is what really matters. |
I'm always surprised very often that as an initial scheme given to a young architect who is full of beans, who wants to go in and do something very extraordinary, he is given a little house for a family. And of course he starts with any ideas and motives he has ever come across and tries to put them all into that one building. It doesn't work, of course, but the most difficult thing for him is to think from that human being which uses that house, that dwelling. A young couple starts, then a baby is born. The baby becomes a tot, the tots become adolescents, grow up and go out of the house, the adults are there, the adults are growing old, and then they are old people. Every cycle of this long life, the different age degrees, have completely different needs, and we have to know these different needs, and that special house has to fulfill all these requirements. That's a difficult task to fulfill. |
|
| |
