[HN Gopher] Tech posers of the Bauhaus
___________________________________________________________________
Tech posers of the Bauhaus
Author : amicoleo
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-03-06 10:29 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.orgonomyproductions.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.orgonomyproductions.info)
| minitoar wrote:
| Is there a Bauhaus software shop? Seems like such an idyllic
| approach to life.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| >It's also because of that school and their influence on art
| education that we can enjoy things designed by people with an
| artistic sensibility. Rather than only having things designed by
| engineers.
|
| So _that 's_ who to blame for my Macbook running so hot!
|
| I intensely dislike the fact that all modern machines look the
| same. All cars look the same. All computers look the same. All
| gadgets look the same. We'd be better off if we fired every
| designer and gave creative control to a team of engineers and
| six-year-olds. They wouldn't know what they're doing, but at
| least they wouldn't chase trends and churn out dozens of
| identical designs.
| brudgers wrote:
| Look around you.
|
| The Bauhaus is everywhere.
|
| Fuller nowhere.
|
| Because the Bauhaus made stuff and Fuller had theories, and while
| fuller was stuck on domes the children of the Bauhaus were making
| hyperboloids.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperboloid_structures
|
| Fuller mostly made arguments instead of changing the world.
|
| The Dymaxion house is great if you have a helicopter and need to
| store triangles and don't mind the curves at the corner.
|
| The geodesic dome house only sounds like a good idea if you
| ignore the idea of living in a building. At some point even
| stoned hippies return to lucidity.
|
| His ideas were different in large part because they weren't very
| good and their best part was their conventionality...yurts and
| domes have been around for thousands of years.
|
| Fuller was a clever engineer.
|
| Clever engineering isn't usually an end in itself.
|
| The Bauhaus wasn't tech posers.
|
| It was artistic posers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Bauhaus wasn 't tech posers. It was artistic posers._
|
| I get this is meant to be pithy, but the Bauhaus was pioneering
| in several aspects of the arts as well.
| brudgers wrote:
| Posture is gesture. Gesture is both necessary and sufficient
| for art.
|
| Part the reason the article is rubbish is denigrating art for
| engineering. Preference of Fuller's posture and celebration
| of its minimal impact as evidence of its importance.
|
| To critique the argument by pointing to Kandinsky can't sell.
| The article is premised on dismissing Kandinsky outright.
|
| Anyway post Warhol posing is known to be an essential
| component of artists. It's just explicit now.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| hard to make in mass production? I think Ikea doesn't agree with
| that (i think Ikea designs are often inspired by Bauhaus, at
| least that is what they say here:
| https://injarch.com/archives/9326 )
| frostburg wrote:
| Ikea products at times are similarly styled but actual Bauhaus
| furniture used very high quality materials.
|
| In a room I have dreadful Ikea bookshelves (a temporary measure
| to store books while looking for a better solution) next to a
| pair of original Wagenfeld table lamps. The difference is
| craftmanship is stark.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, the arts-and-crafts style furniture that my parents
| bought when they got married is still in use today, with
| minor repairs and some refinishing. The Ikea-style furniture
| that they also bought (veneered particle board) is gone.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Ikea's thing is good design and quality for the price. They
| have more expensive higher quality products as well. They
| don't have every quality in every category, though. And their
| products mostly don't have stupid flaws, they have been
| torture tested.
|
| Try buying (aesthetically) well-designed furniture at !Ikea,
| it will start at 2-3x the price and you have to go higher to
| get really good build quality.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Hard to make in injection, press, lost-wax, lithography, or 3D
| print processes, perhaps.
|
| Basic geometric shapes with matte surface and least mount of
| edges are ideal for lathe and mill works, while being basically
| torture tests for the rest.
| swayvil wrote:
| There's a coldness in technology.
|
| Employing a complex machine is a merely intellectual process, all
| else mediated by the machine. Like having sex by remote control.
|
| Otoh, a physical craft is a conversation in multiple dimensions.
| Thought being just one small component.
|
| Given that coldness and limitation, you can understand why some
| artists would eschew technology.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I have visited the Bahaus in Dessau. The place feels human,
| calm and relaxing. Lesser imitations (and, sadly, some later
| works for hire by the same people) copied superficial aspects
| and produced something that feels cold and inhuman.
| de6u99er wrote:
| "Form follows function" is my takeaway from Bauhaus.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Well, they made it look nice, too!
|
| There is a beauty in Bauhaus products that is the result of
| careful consideration (and probably experimentation) of how
| exactly the basic functional shapes are used - colors,
| proportions, placement etc. I'm a total layman though, just a
| fan of Bauhaus design.
| ibn_khaldun wrote:
| I too am a layman in this area, but from what I've gathered
| is that the designers of Bauhaus and similar European design
| movements of the 1900s is they took design and all of its
| elements _very_ seriously. "Good design" was an expression
| of a well thought out approach to the message at hand and was
| a reflection of a society that ought to be well-groomed
| themselves (i.e. intellectually, morally, all those sort of
| qualities).
|
| Intense stuff, mate.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Meh. Design is messy. Moholy-Nage was a polyglot. To point out
| that Moholy-Nage, who is a profound 2-d visionary, was a crap
| industrial designer is like saying Michael Jordan was just OK at
| baseball. Historically the Bauhaus was an inflection point.
| Followed later by Ulm and other design programs who have
| exhaustively documented their pedagogy . If this tradition only
| ever produced Johnny Ive then I'm happy with that.
| ibn_khaldun wrote:
| I appreciate and benefit from whenever a good design story is
| posted on HN and would like to implore anyone with access to them
| to share them more often or at least encourage readers to amplify
| the stories that are already being shared that I might be missing
| out on.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| There's a good point in here poorly made.
|
| The good point is about artists and designers looking to
| technology to drive their inspiration but ultimately mostly just
| peddling a style. Which you can see in the tech world today.
|
| Its poorly made because they try to make the Bauhaus look unique
| in this regard when it happened before (e.g. the Werkbund, the
| Arts and Craft movement, etc.) and after in many other places;
| and also it treats the Bauhaus's complex and nuanced history and
| operation only with sweeping statements (it even more or less
| conflates Gropius, 'the Bauhaus' and the International Style)
| pacaro wrote:
| Maybe I'm being picky, but I think that the author means _poseur_
| when they are saying _poser_
| analog31 wrote:
| When the article talks about manufacturability, I wonder what was
| the actual state of German manufacturing in 1925, or worldwide
| for that matter. What we think of as modern manufacturing
| developed much later, and its epicenter has moved from country to
| country -- America, Japan, China, etc.
|
| Still, the point remains that the artists did not always dream up
| practical designs. Buckminster Fuller wasn't exactly an engineer
| -- I don't think he had a degree. In my own neck of the woods, we
| have the movement surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright. I've been in a
| few of his buildings, and they are maintenance nightmares.
| pgcudahy wrote:
| I would think of Henry Ford and the assembly line just prior to
| this period as the birth of modern manufacturing. Moving from
| artisans doing most or all of the work on an item to
| individuals repeating one process repeatedly as the product
| moves down an assembly line. So I think it was a very relevant
| question for the period of how designers could adapt to it. The
| article just claims they didn't really have any experience with
| these new methods.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I cannot provide references (and don't really feel obliged to
| research them now), but I think this is a misrepresentation of
| bauhaus.
|
| Bauhaus as a school for design was inherently technical with
| Werkstatten (workshops) where craftsmen taught the basics in
| woodworking, and other crafts. In that, Bauhaus continued the
| Arts&Crafts movement (or the respective German edition of that
| movement) while applying a 'simplified' visual language.
|
| Of course a Bauhaus alumnus or a Bauhaus teacher wouldn't reach
| the technical skills of a "Meister" in the crafts, but the
| connection certainly ran deep.
| amicoleo wrote:
| Yes you're absolutely right that Bauhaus as a school was
| technical and a continuation of the Arts & Craft education. As
| you say though, their technical knowledge was around
| craftsmanship, and not in design for manufacturing (like we
| would refer to now).
|
| The key example referred in the article is on a metal-working
| course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students would handmade
| prototypes based on assumptions of what would be easier to
| mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such as cylinders of
| spheres). But in fact products with those shapes were actually
| hard to make industrially.
| eternalban wrote:
| > a metal-working course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students
| would handmade prototypes based on assumptions of what would
| be easier to mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such
| as cylinders of spheres). But in fact products with those
| shapes were actually hard to make industrially.
|
| This was cause for a good laugh, though that likely wasn't
| your intention. But hear me out.
|
| What doesn't seem to be mentioned is that Bauhuas was a
| leftist school. Moholy-Nagy is being your typical Marxist
| teaching a class on industrial products without having ever
| even stepping foot in a factory, much less knowing the state
| of industrial manufacturing.
|
| Poser of tech? Well, in a way, Bauhaus was investigating the
| _aesthetics_ of Modernity and industrial society. The
| disregard for actual manufacturing realities is entirely in
| line with disregarding human psychology when proscribing
| utopian authoritarian societies. It is a mindset and it
| should be added, symptomatic of their conceit.
| ibn_khaldun wrote:
| Your tone detracts from the intrigue of this comment I for
| one, have no problem with it at all. I only bring it up to
| make an accessory complaint about how the bland enforcement
| of "civility" online can stifle people who express
| themselves in a certain way. You could've easily
| disregarded the first two lines of your comment and began
| with the "Poser of tech?" line, but without, it's just
| mundane input void of any association with a human being
| that actually _feels_ something about the topic at hand
| instead of just having a thought about it.
|
| Anyway, I loved your critique. With all of this being said,
| from at least a visual perspective, how do you feel about
| the work inspired by Bauhaus? What sort of design do you
| feel appreciates the human psychology of the
| issues/environment it intends to involve itself with?
| eternalban wrote:
| Products of political design schools, by key practioners,
| are generally good, usually strong design. The
| ideological framing certain can help in guiding design,
| providing continuity (even if the "narrative fact" is
| imaginal).
|
| I generally disregard the narrative attached to design -
| went to arch school so am entirely jaded about that
| aspect of design. So I love Sant'Elia but have a few
| issues with the Manifesto; love some Italian Fascist
| buildings (they're gorgeous) but am not a fan of Duce;
| same goes for Bauhaus: quite a few gems came out of
| Bauhaus, but as you noted I did not hide my disdain for
| that 'wing' of the orthodox binary political spectrum.
|
| Two dyads that have been adopted fairly generally as
| central to design for modern humanity are: individual vs.
| collective, and, man and nature.
|
| The architects that I admire started from the I|C
| paradigm and ended up in M|N.
|
| The former has an unfortunate tendency to be subsumed by
| a political reading of the question: what is the order
| and nature of the relationship between the individual and
| the collective. This dyad has proved to be a disaster,
| for example, in psuedo (poser) Marxist/Socialist
| approaches to mass housing, and is in no small part
| responsible for the distasteful Post-Modernism that
| followed in reaction.
|
| So design research in Man | Nature dyad. That is my
| personal direction and what I think (obviously :) is the
| appropriate venue of further efforts. (Why: The question
| of unit-collective is in fact embedded in that dyad. So
| is the quite topically urgent question of Man | Machine.)
| amicoleo wrote:
| Could you elaborate on why you think teachers in the
| Bauhaus were Marxist?
|
| I don't know about Moholy-Nagy specifically, but the
| founder Gropius tried many times to collaborate with
| industrialists to get Bauhaus objects to be produced
| (sometimes successfully) and his most famous architecture
| project was the Fagus factory. I really didn't see any
| Marxism in his ideas...
| eternalban wrote:
| I didn't say all of them. Utopian Left, is that better?
| [see p.s.]
|
| This is a very good read and answers your questions far
| better than I could:
|
| _International Communist Current: Success and failure of
| the Bauhaus (2012)_ :
|
| https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201207/5066/suc
| ces...
|
| p.s. Actually we can answer that question based on the
| topic.
|
| Bauhaus was inventing forms for industrial production.
| This means using machines with the inevitable reduction
| of human labor in the production process. As this
| logically would ultimately reduce workers to consumers
| and designers (as ultimate reduction of craftmanship),
| the ownership of the production means is an issue. Unless
| this owned by the state, Bauhaus then is guilty of
| pretending to socialism while helping industry tycoons
| retool their factories. I opt for their sincerity and
| thus the _unspoken_ truth of Bauhau 's social program has
| to be a state where non-labor capital is owned by the
| people/state. Otherwise, they would focus on design that
| required substantial human involvement.
| emteycz wrote:
| That's mentioned in the article, the problem they're talking
| about is that the classes were focused on handwork and what the
| teachers thought would be good for industrial production, but
| actually wasn't.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's misunderstanding the goal of teaching handwork.
| Handwork teaches you about the materials behavior first and
| foremost, which is absolutely essential knowledge when you
| want to do something industrial, unless you will be using a
| material that you can't work by hand, such as synthetics.
|
| But if you want to use wood industrially having basic
| woodworking knowledge will teach you a lot of very useful
| stuff about the properties of wood, what you can and can not
| make, regardless of the manufacturing methods, the strengths
| and weaknesses of the materials and so on.
|
| Ditto for metals, and to some extent this goes for glass and
| ceramics as well (though in manufacturing methods those come
| closer to working with plastics, the same goes for casting
| metals).
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Yes. You need to understand both the material and the
| industrial production methods. The criticism was that
| Bauhaus only taught the former.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. A key point here is that some complex things are easy to
| mass produce. If you can make it by stamping (available in the
| Bauhaus period) or casting (also available), adding decorative
| detail doesn't cost you anything. There's a class of parts you
| can make on a four-slide machine cheaply, and it includes most
| small threaded parts like the ones used in assembling lamps.
|
| A good example from that period was stamped tin ceilings, which
| were a big thing in the US around 1880-1920 or so. These are
| purely decorative ceiling panels, available in many patterns.
| They replaced decorative hand-made plasterwork. Some of the
| patterns have Victorian details, some are rather plain.
| Manufacturing cost does not increase with pattern
| complexity.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.decorativeceilingtiles.net/tin-ceiling-tiles/
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| I think you're right. This is the impression I got after
| reading about Bauhaus in the ABC's of Triangle, Circle, Square.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It is aso worth noting that craftsmen based manufacturing,
| espcially in the early 20th century, has nothing to do with
| mass production. And what machine learning has to do with any
| of that, I have no idea.
| [deleted]
| ddkto wrote:
| There is a similarity to the work of Charles and Ray Eames.
| Though motivated by the possibilities of mass-manufacture, but
| still produced many designs that could not be produced cost-
| effectively at scale.
|
| Their aims for mass-manufactured, well-designed goods has been
| best realized by IKEA.
|
| Were the Bauhaus and the Eames' failures because they did not
| realize the potential of their ideas? Obviously not! It is
| fascinating to study Bauhaus precisely because it is a hinge, a
| link between a world of craft-work and the world of mass-
| production. If you look at how they spent their time and
| organized their classes, it looks very old-school - but in that
| context, they were forward looking and set the aims for a new
| generation of design.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-06 23:01 UTC)