If you have a difficult time (as I did) differentiating between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, you might enjoy this article I wrote on it. There are at least four key ways to tell the difference: time of creation, curved lines vs. geometrical shapes, organic vs. machinic themes, and Japanonisme influence.
I actually prefer Art Nouveau personally and wish there were more buildings that adopted the style. It seems like a good pairing for solarpunk architecture.
Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse, probably because it’s more similar to modernism, both of which are origins for the “minimal” aesthetic style that is still prevalent. Looking at an old Art Deco or Art Nouveau building feels like peering into a lost world, while Bauhaus isn’t dramatically different from most of what gets built today.
I don’t mean to sound pretentious but i have a hard time understanding how anyone can have a difficult time differentiating between art nouveau and art deco. The only similarity between the two lies in word “art”.
In that post I explore a few ideas as to why I think this happens. I think it’s more that Art Nouveau gets labeled as Deco.
In general though, both are art movements from roughly the same time period with roughly the same basic principles. For someone unfamiliar with art history, it can be confusing in a way that doesn’t happen with say, Medieval vs. Neoclassical architecture.
Not the same time period. Art Nouveau started in the 1890s and was exhausted by the time of the start of the First World War (1914). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau
Read my comment again. I said “roughly” the same time period. And yes, they overlapped for about a decade and from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with art history and living a century later, that is very close.
WW-I was a huge event in the history of this world, and it is a pretty clear divider between those two styles of art and architecture.
I wouldn't call pre-WWI and post-WWI "roughly the same time period". Not by a long stretch.
The length of time between them is not relevant in this case. What is relevant is the events that occurred between them.
Like the pre-atomic age and the post-atomic age. The events themselves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively short-lived. But their impact on this world greatly exceeded the time immediately before those two events and the time immediately after those events.
No, it's not a "clear divider" between the two. It was more of a slow transition between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, which as I already stated, overlapped for nearly a decade.
This is all pretty clearly laid out in the historical literature that you yourself linked to. You don't seem to understand how art movements work; there is not a firm dividing line when one ends and the next begins.
Beyond that, the question was about why people mix the two. Your nit-picking about how we should divide history is irrelevant to the discussion.
Art Deco got its start in 1910, but it didn't take off until after WWI. I did read those pages, even though I've been a big fan of Art Nouveau since I met my wife in the mid-90s and she introduced me to the style, and I was a fan of Art Deco since I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
And I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years, in a house that was built in 1910 (according to the numbers formed into the bricks), and I lived about two blocks away from Hotel Horta. We have several coffee table books on Art Nouveau and Art Deco, some of which you can no longer find.
So, I am very well acquainted with both styles and when they were common. I also make a point of reading articles at any links that I include for reference.
Well, then it's a little unclear to me what you are arguing against. That they aren't from "roughly the same time period" from the perspective of someone that isn't familiar with art history? Why would someone unfamiliar with art history make a distinction between early 20th century art movements? They both occurred in the early 20th century, unlike (as I used in my example) neoclassical and medieval styles, which occurred centuries apart.
This is the subject of the grandparent post that I was replying to. Yes, in actuality, they overlapped a bit, and Art Nouveau waned as Art Deco rose – although again, this is not so clear cut in other art fields as it is in architecture; e.g., jewelry or furniture.
WWI was a watershed event. A world-changing event. It wasn't as short as the time period between when the first atomic bomb was dropped and when the second one was dropped, but in the scale of world events, it was still relatively short.
And while Art Deco got started before WWI, it didn't really take off until after WWI.
Just like Art Nouveau that got started in the 1890s, but didn't really take off until after the International Paris Exhibition in 1900.
Both styles took several years to get started and really take off. And Art Deco didn't really take off until after WWI.
I think the source of the issue is that Art Nouveau and Art Deco also both commonly get mixed up with Arts & Crafts (as well as Craftsman and Mission), which is ancestral to them both and shares elements with both -- sinuous organic shapes and hard geometric shapes.
> Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse
Could it be that the most acclaimed expressions of art nouveau were the product of a gilded age, while the bauhaus legacy was mostly enacted during the postwar period where speed of rebuilding was more important that quality of buildings?
There was actually a lot more money put into art deco (which happened post WW1) than art nouveau, but yeah bauhaus and modernism certainly flourished in a resource-scarce post-war environment.
The other big influence is that a lot of the members of the Bauhaus went to the US to teach, and so they influenced many of the midcentury designers that designed and built the post-war world.
A lot of people are old enough to have lived when Bauhaus was ”the modern look.” Hence, it now looks just plain ”old” whereas Art Deco and Noveau look ”classic.”
To me Art Deco seems to range from Kinda Like Art Nouveau all the way to "I can't Believe it's not Bauhaus".
Deco and Bauhaus both seem to sometimes share an excitement towards mass production and materials themselves.
Art Deco shows off luxury and wealth, which is not very far from truth to materials.
With art Nouveau I notice designs more than materials, unless they're simple natural things like wood, not really giving any sense of technical achievement or extravagance in the actual materials.
Bauhaus seems to deliberately design things that would not work without the specific high end materials used, and look out of place if they are scratched, everything is pointing to the raw substance, the craftsmanship, the function, and the level of maintenance, and
the design is just a frame.
Art Deco doesn't do the minimalism thing the same way,
I greatly prefer Art Nouveau, but it seems like both the aesthetic and philosophy of Bauhaus is everywhere.
Maybe there's something missing in my personality since I don't quite feel the appeal of simplicity and valuable materials as strongly as some, while the more philosophical types all seem to love it.
I think part of the mass appeal of Bauhaus might be because it got popular when tech was worse. You couldn't make a cheap CrapBoard thing and veneer it, unless you wanted it to peel in a week. That still happens, but it's possible to reliability do form, function, and material more separately.
Maybe people were tired of crappy goods that broke in a year, and Bauhaus was a way of advertising that you weren't doing that.
Now of course, durability seems random, and sometimes people take superficial Bauhaus elements and use them without the deep quality that it was supposed to be about, and it looks bad from the start and then breaks.
And we've got cheap synthetic materials that can be incredibly strong if you know how to design with them, although unfortunately they do not survive the trash compactor, when people toss them even though they're perfectly good, because people tend to see things without valuable substance as disposable.
Maybe its just me but the art and style movements of the first part of the 20th century (up until the sixties) are somehow more profoundly beautiful (in different ways), wholesome and memorable.
I don't even know what the "modern styles" are supposed to be. Maybe the time of coherent stylistic movements with a well articulated aesthetic is gone?
You pretty much delineated the “modernism” era and the era we are currently stuck in, “post modernism”. From the construction of the Eiffel Tower to WW2, you get rough markers indicating that era.
A great book regarding art in particular is called “The Shock of the New”. There’s also an 8-part (nearly 8 hours long) TV version of it you can find on YouTube.
I sort of have a problem with "post modernism". I'm of the belief that as long as the culture continues to persist we will always be in the modern era.
I see the modern era as directly linked to the machine age.
My thinking is that at this stage design is so democratic and available to anyone that we are in the timeless era. I believe that 'post modernism" was invented by the second generation modernist and critiques as a way to create an artificial distinction.
I think now we have gotten to the point where modern aesthetics are driven by everything the modernists where dealing with the addition of code compliance.
The machine age has become so regulated as to dictate a WAG of 80% the design decisions.
I identify as a modernist.
I will check out the YouTube as I'm hungry for long form design content.
> I see the modern era as directly linked to the machine age.
Agreed. I'd qualify further and say the mechanical machine age was to modernism as the digital machine age is to post modernism. From steam to screens.
> we are in the timeless era.
Yes, often referred to as the end of history. From Wikipedia:
The idea of an "end of history" does not imply that nothing more will ever happen. Rather, what the postmodern sense of an end of history tends to signify is, in the words of contemporary historian Keith Jenkins, the idea that "the peculiar ways in which the past was historicized (was conceptualized in modernist, linear and essentially metanarrative forms) has now come to an end of its productive life; the all-encompassing 'experiment of modernity' ... is passing away into our postmodern condition".
> with the addition of code compliance.
That's actually really funny and an astute observation I've never considered. IT sort of aligns well with the delineations as well as things like building code came into existence starting in the 1950s mainly and have evolved to encompass more and more of the process. The managerial state.
I was part of the first generation of designers to have access to desktop publishing and all the entails. I ended up leveraging my computer aptitude to the point where design firms kept me in the technical realm.
The digital production realm has greatly informed my design process thinking. Where I use "digital production" efficiency techniques in the analog world.
I see my place as a designer as the last generation that is aware to the analog world and able to use digital tools.
My hope is that I get a good 15-20 more years of output.
I can tell that we have very similar point of views and I would love to talk more about this area.
I see each new design aesthetic as embedding a new feature in the overall design constraints.
25 already I had a teacher telling we were in post modernism. I also never grasped the definition of it, if it has any. Can we really be that long in a same "era"?
Yeah I hear ya. I think it’s generally a lot of notions. The general zeitgeist and a bunch of other of Heidegger’s ideas and those he influenced.
I do think there are real distinctions though. You see it profoundly in literature. Modernist literature has many different concerns in terms of structure, narrative, form, etc. Postmodernist writing just completely deconstructed it and reformed it.
And I think that’s a big part of postmodernism - deconstruction. You see it in so many artifacts, social systems, and day-to-day life.
Saying that I think we are in more of a hyper modern world today which is an extension of post but even more broken down and individualized and virtual. A works where we have multiple identities and exist in multiple places at once in different forms.
Funnily enough I remember when deconstructionists hit Architecture. My school had a wild deconstructionists architecture department. Led by Larry Mitnick.
I have a friend in the program whose dad was a "Post-Modernist" Yalie architect horrified at what his son was calling architecture. Eventually he went to Yale like his dad...
I prefer to think of that period as deeper understanding of the patterns that humans in a society must endure while living in a totally built world.
I still remember him lecture me on up and down during a summer program in 11th grade. He also told me I should spend my life studying corners. Still inspiring words to this day but I knew I just had to be an industrial designer.
I have to give gratitude to HN for providing me a context to share my thoughts on deconstructionist and design.
This I'm sure drives my resistance to new terms. I see the simplicity of Modernism as the least number of rules. This provides the designer to conceive of the manufactured through the required parameters.
I wish architects could design decent residential houses at scale but alas, costs are often the overriding driver. Even still, it seems like many houses are designed from the inside out today.
Some of the ways post modernism has influenced these kids of things is via the new materials available. So we end up with a lot of things that are approximations of modernist and earlier things. Like doors and windows. A modern cheap door that is stamped plastic and filled with styrofoam is made to look like the way we remember doors looking. It may have fake wood grain to imply it's wood like doors were always made. It will have styles and rails like classic doors but they serve no purpose other than to look approximately like an actual door looked like.
Or corners, as you pointed out. A stone corner would use coining to achieve structural integrity. But now a stone veneer wall approximates that technique because we just think that's how stone walls should look. It just results in everything looking very inauthentic and I think that has an effect on us. Like comparing a real European town built hundreds of years ago to something that imitates one at a theme park. Uncanny valley territory.
Architects don't see or touch normal residential houses. They only get called in to work on high end custom homes.
Normal residential homes are designed and built by companies that are devoid of real architects and engineers, and specialize in doing things as cheaply and quickly as inhumanly possible and at mass scales. Production building companies are totally happy to break as many laws as they can in the process, so long as they don't get caught, or the fines are sufficiently low enough that it just becomes just a part of doing business.
An interesting question is whether the need for sustainable buildings will ever create an authentic solarpunk aesthetic. I notice various new apartment buildings now featuring green glasses (e.g. in balconies) for that entirely fake feel good factor. On the other hand new materials for insulation, new (old) techniques for cooling etc. certainly give enough ideas. There is even a new european bauhaus :-) [1]
What is funny about this is that ruthless efficiency in nature creates beauty. Ruthless efficiency in human development pushes the inefficiencies into another unmeasured cubicle.
I hope you enjoy it. It’s really great imo. I was stuck in the hospital for a couple weeks when I read the book. It’s remarkable and Robert Hughes was one of those rare critics that was a sort of teacher and philosopher who loved the things he was in task of critically analyzing.
For architecture, modern style seems to be focused on maintaining resale value and/or blending in, depending on whether we're talking about residential or commercial spaces. Post-modern commercialism as a style?
I wonder if this has to do with the fact that people don't live their whole lives in one place as often anymore.
If I think I'm going to live out the rest of my life in my house, I'll want to change it to suit my taste, maybe even multiple times if new artistic styles crop up and I like them better.
If I'm expecting I might need to sell the house in the next five years, I'm going to prioritize having the widest possible potential buyer pool.
What puzzles me (being a casual observer) is that post-modern commercialism does not seem to affect all design domains equally. I would say that e.g. current automobile design seems to have still fairly identifiable style propositions (whether I like them being a different matter).
The forces of safety/market standards that an automobile must conform to is combining with capabilities of the materials available.
This makes the easiest/safest answers pretty standard. Automobiles combine many disciplines which makes for long development time lines. This further reduces options.
Multi-dwelling housing above 5 units will also show this same phenomenon.
Coffee makers could be very dynamic market due to fewer dependencies.
I wouldn't say sixties necessarily, but I'd agree.
It toned down the glorious excess of the belle epoque, expanded away from classical tradition, but still preserved a timeless sense of balance and harmony. New technological advances also opened up the building, they could become light, dainty.
I'm on the board of an old organization maintaining/running an Art Noveau house from 1906. The interiors haven't been preserved, unfortunately, but in the main hall we've tried to preserve and restore it as much as possible while still keeping it usable for its original function.
The Bauhaus should have included workers housing interiors. Comparable to the Dutch (het scip worker housing), German art informed workers housing and the Bauhaus designed to that market as well as luxe.
Het Schip is Amsterdamse School, which uses a lot of elements of art deco (e.g. rounded brick stone walls), but also tries to keep things simple, yet quality, which feels more Bauhaus.
I recently bought a house from 1918 in Amsterdamse School style and am trying to reflect this in the interior as well (exterior is already beautifully done).
I really like that they called the housing worker's palaces. You can definitely see that in the attention to detail.
I stayed at an art deco hotel in Cambodia years ago. For my brain, it was the most satisfying combination of color, form, detail, and space. I’ll never have the money, but I think living in that type of design would do wonders for my mental health.
Bauhaus and the Athens Charter movement (Le Corbusier) are, to some extent, legitimate and interesting periods.
The problem is that for various historical reasons, mostly related to the second world war and the fast post-war growth the architectural side grew vastly out of proportions.
As a side note, many of the most influential architects of this era were had no formal training in the craft, the tabula rasa approach was quite convenient.
An highly problematic side effect is that the following generation was not properly trained, and they relied on pseudo-philosophical bullshit to obfuscate their lack of architectural skills.
Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design, but we lost so much that we'll have to start somewhere.
By the way, this is not the first time it happens in History.
> Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design
Why?
Many college campuses in the US are pastiches of medieval european towns. This admiration for older styles in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave this country (and I'd say, even the world) the most wonderful architectural environments, truly beautiful and harmonious environments.
The spiteful iconoclasm of post-WW2 instead gave us the most awful dreck.
I don't disagree with you at all. The 1900 campus building were most likely a new technique called re-enforced brick masonry. They were produced to match the earlier buildings.
The Bauhaus school of thought held the same re-enforced brick masonry techniques could be used to produce the same square footage using less material labor.
Post War Europe was in a race to provide resources before everything fell apart again.
New England Colleges have bottled up that sentiment and sell it for $10k a month.
The trend I dislike is how everything looks like an airport coffee shop/sports bar. The New England colleges are now trying to look like airport to me.
My home town has a treasure trove of Art Nouveau buildings in it's historic city center. It's a very desirable area to live in, so most of those units have been renovated over time. Sadly those renovations almost never respect the original and follow whatever trend of the moment.
One thing i'd like to do is to acquire some of the remaining rare gems that remain (mostly) untouched and restore them to their original glory. I ever wonder if there is room for a business model here, like home flipping but with a side of restoration and preservation.
> Sadly those renovations almost never respect the original and follow whatever trend of the moment.
Not to be trite, but following that line of thinking back then would have prevented the Art Nouveau buildings from existing in the first place - assuming they replaced gothic buildings (or whatever was trendy) when they got built
Life is so strange. Robin Boyd criticized Australian architecture for being an ugly confused mix of ideas and focusing on parts rather than the whole, featurism. There was an idea that every home owner should choose their own design and style. Robin disapproved, saying essentially, the results are ugly.
He did that in the 1960s.
Since the addition of pintrest, the computing revolution and more, it's somehow gotten worse. Most commercial properties going up have abandoned the laid back 1950s stying for 'generic house' that had visual depth, two-car garage, a garden, textured wall materials and a verandah (porch) of some kind.
The new properties look like someone took the "Default Cube" you get in Blender and copy pasted it a few times. Flat concrete walls that look like a ww2 pill box.
Ctrl C, Ctrl V, it would appear, has absolutely murdered beautiful houses. I know there's other reasons... but the death of beautiful houses in a country where home ownership (well, land ownership) has been the primary dream since settlement.. it hits a little too close to home.
And now thanks to advances in industrialization, everyone can enjoy art deco housing, lovelessly crafted by CnC from templates, defeating both, the bauhaus and the art deco at the same time and ending the argument.
That is exactly the point where my design aesthetic starts. The belief that large manufacturers will be creating products that can easily be modified for the actual customer.
It's most likely the other way around: Arthur Evans, who excavated the site of Knossos is known to have done many fantastical restorations to make them more impressive, and they were inspired by his contemporary styles (art nouveau/deco)
Remember that all sort of "leaders" supported expeditions to far away places. Suddenly an average in Parisian could see with their own eyes objects from far away lands.
As trade increased there would also be wooden boxes/crates with exotic markings.
Oskar Schlemmer was most famous for designs for the "triadic ballet" staged by the Bauhaus. It's nice to see his wider work represented in the the Bauhaus-style interiors of Rabe House here.
Interesting, so the name for the shitty and gross design elements found in so many of the “child management” buildings I grew up in (like schools), is “Bauhaus”.
Art movements are really just a cataloging technique. The movements can be named by dealers trying to develop a market, artists trying to articulate camaraderie, art historians retroactively categorizing what they think happened.
They are all employed to promote and communicate. I'm more interested human artifact creation.
I find it's more interesting to ignore movements and focus on the artifacts.
All the terms are just ways to be articulate.
Here is a cheat sheet on Greek and Roman columns. The image is from the general wikipedia page on Columns.
That ignorance of beauty being a perfectly valid prime objective over function, for everyday objects (or architecture) is why most things and buildings today look straight out of a dystopian sci-fi flic.
And because we love to live in such bland spaces, "decorated" with such furniture, inside such buildings, is probably also why people spend tons of money every year to escape them.
And to e.g. visit picturesque European cities and villages with tiny winding roads and "needlessly" decorated building facades in their holidays.
Glad someone else caught that. Saying beauty in decoration is “needless” is like saying we should only have non fiction books. Fiction - invention - creativity - fantasy - has its place both in furniture and publishing.
I feel many people truly misunderstand what the Bauhaus School was about and the Great Leap Forward it brought.
The problem statement that the Bauhaus school was founded under was along the lines of this.
The machine age is upon us. The guilds of the craftsman is holding back the training of the workers. The machine age is providing easy access to materials that are more dynamic than wood or stone. The Arts and Crafts movement is generally given credit as the step between the old world and the machine age production.
The Bauhaus was founded to train architects and designers to work with machine age production. The early days they had a hard time getting the students to understand that a machine couldn't produce a cherub. There was a deep seated belief that culture was dangerous after the Great War and peace could exist through efficient use of resources. The machine age would bring a world of abundance if resources were used efficiently.
Finally my art history teachers would have a conniption if a student referred to Bauhaus style architecture. The proper term is International Style. This name is relevant becuase it was to have no cultural preconceived notions. This would promote peace through understanding. The goal was that a human could be dropped in the space from anywhere in the world and navigate their surroundings. I see it as a worthy goal.
Not every building is successful and I admit to being indoctrinated in design since birth but I find this place people and the knowledge workers seem to thrive.
> The goal was that a human could be dropped in the space from anywhere in the world and navigate their surroundings. I see it as a worthy goal.
It's funny, because I've often used an expression that's almost a perfect inversion of this in order to describe the world's best places. That you could be dropped into a place and know that you are in exactly that place, and not in any of the innumerable identity-less spaces on the planet.
I don't believe the inversion is inherent. I believe a unique identity can exist without explicit cultural references. I don't see the split or the inversion.
It might be you would describe that as dystopian but I suppose dystopian is in the eye of the beholder.
I guess this is a good as place as any to mention that Corbusier railed against the metric system as anti-human. The reasoning was that human spaces should be defined through human proportions not power of 10 proportioning.
The lack of tolerance for other peoples preferences is considered dystopian in some circles.
It's distinctly... hideous. It looks like a prison block, not a place to encourage human happiness.
> I guess this is a good as place as any to mention that Corbusier railed against the metric system as anti-human. The reasoning was that human spaces should be defined through human proportions not power of 10 proportioning.
That is a silly argument, nothing about the metric system requires you to have power-of-10 proportions in your construction, any more than we have power-of-12 proportions in U.S. construction just because we use feet and inches.
I can tell you haven't been there, which is okay, but I have to try to explain it.
The Salk Institute is inarguably one of the most beautiful man made places in southern California. It was built with the explicit intent to attract and cluster the best and brightest minds in the world so they could work together to eliminate human disease. It's all human scale, calm, focused ... the concrete is somehow warm. It masterfully directs the sunlight around it and creates contrasting shadowy nooks where people can chat and take refuge from the heat on hot days. It's inspiring. You can feel the creative power within its walls.
Brilliant people from every corner of the globe still uproot their lives just to work there. There are many awful examples of brutalist architecture, but this building isn't one.
Shapes can support skilled expressions of beauty. The least effort spent on drawing a curve, by hand or mathematically, has more beauty than cube.
You know what else provides shade in hot days? Trees. Shade cloth. Umbrellas. Sails. Statues. Market stalls. Extrusions. ext.
Cube is cube.
You can feel anything when it's written. If it's a cold day and your dog just died (or whatever is enough in your personal life to make you slightly unhappy), I'd prefer to be anywhere else in the world than huddled for warmth behind a grey Cube, with the ever present discomfort of infectious disease protocols in the back of my mind.
Cube is completely submitted to the purpose of the building, it has no relation to the human body or experience.
Okay yes true. Cube shapes are everywhere. And reductionism, minimalism and brutalism have their virtues. I am content to die on the hill that Cube is ugly, if my concession is pleasing.
As you with your opinion that it is a beautiful construction in the first place. Difference is the Parent’s opinion was suppressed in modern architecture and yours was imposed.
I thought that might be your reaction to the Salk Institute. I have a feeling prisoners would prefer the Salk institute to their current conditions. I don't think you are giving any Creedence to the personality types that might want to work at the Salk Institute.
I'm glad we agree it is distinct.
I guess I didn't make my silly argument articulate enough. Let me try again.
I was trying to point on the Modernist architect's obsession with the individual over the industrial age. I was trying to point out that he thought the measurement should be in reference to the form which gets lost if people start trying to have even decimal numbers.
I have to agree here. I'm all for different architectural styles, so they can embody the local environment, culture, history. Yet that style is the embodiment of an idea more than anything. I know it is linked to a zeitgeist of somewhere in the not distant past, and to ideas of funcionalism, maybe minimalism etc but I fail to see local/regional culture there. I fail to see any interaction with nature there. Looking at it... oh man, does it look hideous to me. Maybe it's because I lived for many years in Brasília, the most car centric city I've ever been to, the butt of many jokes to people who went to live there. "The city with no street corners." Also no sidewalks, a city where blocks have names such as "Entertainment Sector South", "Hotel Sector North", etc. Ugh...
But... hey, I have some friends who still live there and enjoy it. I know people who really enjoy life there, so that's why I'm all for different architectural/urbanism styles. Too bad I also know some people who would love to move from there but can't. Life is complicated.
I would love to visit Brasilia. I understand that the planning stage was a little too utopian. I think that they have been working to mold it into a functional city. What is interesting is the thought of a city needing to be worn in like blue jeans.
That is certainly a post industrialization idea. Life is complicated I only know what works for me.
That reference is interesting because we only know that location absent the original inhabitants. What we understand as that structure is a view unique to a point in time. I think the timeless was a major design goal.
To share a different perspective from the sibling comment, I love brutalist architecture. My interest for design sparked largely from seeing these structures around my old university town, e.g. Killam library. These days I'm more interested in new urbanism, but I have endless joy in telling people who believe their aesthetics universal that I've never enjoyed another library more than that big lightless cube. This especially bothered people compared to the halifax central library, with its modern glass walls and open spaces, which I couldn't stand.
This is to say, I believe a foundation to design thought is being able to accept differing aesthetics. I'm not sure if I can find a positive reference for people who simply call everything they don't like ugly, but hopefully, my acts of schadenfreude have opened a mind or two to the same perspective.
Surely you can understand why artists traumatized by WWI might consider cultural uniformity a worthy goal? After watching millions of people slain simply by being from the wrong side of mostly arbitrary national lines, there is an entirely human and humane argument for a design style that deliberately erases cultural lines.
I agree with you that specificity is a worthy goal too: people like to feel their lives are unique and irreplaceable.
Exactly! So much of what the Bauhaus designed was meant to use these new materials and machines to build simple and beautiful products for everyone. It was meant to allow everyone to have access to the same sort of products that used to be reserved for the wealthy. We love more decorative styles, but they're so expensive. Bauhaus was taking a look at those styles and asking, "How can we use modern tools and materials to provide something beautiful for everyone?"
Architects and product designers saw Bauhaus and thought they could skip the decorations and call it a day, leading to ugly cities and crappy products, but that ain't Bauhaus!
Minimal, aesthetic and functional things remain few and far between; the old iPod was Bauhaus, but most other things? Not so much.
The main thing making Bauhaus dystopian is its alienation of humans from nature. In contrast, wabi sabi emphasises connection with nature, which creates a very different effect, while still being minimal.
Edit: another difference is approach to irregular shapes. Bauhaus bans them, while wabi sabi embraces them. I think that too makes the first dystopian and the latter human.
Isn't that a large ornament of a bird right on top of that house?
I'd argue that scene has _many_ design elements that are there only the sake of aesthetics. Whether you consider them ornamentation or not I guess depends on your perspective, but if you look closely you'll see lots of shapes and textures that would have required significant effort purely to add beauty. Japanese aesthetics also tend to value the uniqueness of hand crafted objects, and architecture that is built with care by a skilled tradesperson.
Whereas Bauhaus and much of modernism in general were often about stripping all non-essential design elements away, whether ornamentation or otherwise. Essentially: the minimum manufacturing effort to produce a building that meets the functional requirements, ideally in such a way that can be mass manufactured. The end result of a lot of Bauhaus designs isn't particularly visually minimalist. Indeed, there are often a lot of contrasting shapes and colours and often lack of symmetry.
Both are a form of minimalism, but very different in philosophy.
The problem is the Bauhaus was school of education not a movement. Bauhaus was totally focused on trying to figure out how not to lose humanity in the machine age.
The Foundation program that was developed for first year students at the Bauhaus is the same Foundation program that I went through in 1987 at my Art university.
Individual instructors had all sorts of ideas that were bananas. The resulting curriculum has stood the test of time for training young minds to deal with new materials and experiences.
I see design as the philosophical use of resources. One can create any aesthetic values one wants. The ultimate design measure from my point of view is the extent the artifact represents a waste of resources.
I think that if you made something look like the Japanese wabi sabi design, but while using industrial materials and methods, a Bauhaus person would probably consider it to be "ornamentation", because they hate everything that hides instead of reveals, and would rather have unnatural things look unnatural.
If a 3D printer makes an irregular shape, it's because it was specifically designed that way for appearance and no other reason, which they would probably consider lying, and the old school Japanese architects might too...
Even if you did make a building however they did in Japan 100 years ago, I would imagine a Bauhaus person might think you were just being extra, and your choice to do that was just a giant unnecessary performance piece, because you didn't just take the shortest path to pure function.
I'm not exactly sure why people all of a sudden really started caring about philosophy in 2009, but it seems to coincide with the rise of the red pill forums and such.
Before that it seemed like there was a lot more things imitating more organic shapes and traditional materials with modern methods, or hiding modern things behind old things.
I'm also not sure why people even like the entire concept of simple functional things, in the digital age. They take active effort to even remember they're there, the shortest path is just to chop the garlic with a knife and take notes on a phone.
In the article Art Déco is presented as an explicitly non-naturalistic style with decorations there being based on geometric shapes. Yet, I don't think it's common to describe Déco as a dystopian style.
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https://onthearts.com/p/art-nouveau-vs-art-deco
I actually prefer Art Nouveau personally and wish there were more buildings that adopted the style. It seems like a good pairing for solarpunk architecture.
Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse, probably because it’s more similar to modernism, both of which are origins for the “minimal” aesthetic style that is still prevalent. Looking at an old Art Deco or Art Nouveau building feels like peering into a lost world, while Bauhaus isn’t dramatically different from most of what gets built today.