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    From Bauhaus to Our House
    From Bauhaus to Our House
    From Bauhaus to Our House
    Ebook136 pages2 hours

    From Bauhaus to Our House

    By Tom Wolfe

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    After critiquing—and infuriating—the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our Haus.

    In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass and steel box designed buildings that have influenced—and infected—America’s cities.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 24, 2009
    ISBN9781429924252
    From Bauhaus to Our House
    Author

    Tom Wolfe

    Tom Wolfe (1930–2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of contemporary classics like The Right Stuff and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.” Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lived in New York City.

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    Reviews for From Bauhaus to Our House

    3.5/5

    197 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Wolfe's effort to critique 20th Century architecture is not particularly well thought out, and now times have changed to include buildings he said would never get built. Nevertheless, it is witty and highly readable.
    • 5/5
      Ugliness and impracticality in the name of progress are not really progress and there is no justification for ugliness and impracticality.

      I see these homes. There is a riverside home I admire, built into a hill on a riverbend with a lovely view. However, this home has a flat roof, which was a popular architectural feature at the time it was built. We are in a northern location with lots of heavy snow. No matter how lovely the home, or how cheap the price, I would never, ever, buy a flat roofed house in this climate. But it is progressive, it is "modern". Hopefully, the owners see the style as worth having a perpetually leaking roof.

      I see what these ideas have led to. Contractors build houses without architectural guidance, while still borrowing their ideas. Now I see plenty of houses that; well, one can only presume that a house exists, because of the evidence of a garage. You drive by and see a garage and the hint that the building continues on and that the garage may be part of an overall larger structure and that a home may indeed, exist somewhere behind that garage. I call this particular architectural style "anti-curb appeal".

      Regardless of that, other people are free to live in whatever house they can tolerate and I have my own tastes. My home is very old, built while this little rural town was riding the crest of a "spa" boom. It is tall, well built and graciously proportioned. We enjoy plenty of natural light through our tall, plentiful windows. The floor joists are made from trees that were squared off. The snow slides right off the steeply pitched roof. As we live in the north, there are a few hot days in summer, but the old hardwoods in the yard provide shade, the high ceilings ventilate the heat upwards and the cross breezes through the screened windows make air conditioning unnecessary. While there are a few things I would change, like re-converting the previous owner's man cave back into a garage, a more efficient floor plan within the existing structure, and replacing the mid-century stone porch with a reproduction of the original wood porch, I love my house and it is perfect for the way we use it.

      I think Wolfe was right about Courbusier being a fascist; I am sure that if he had his way my house would be razed and replaced with a flat roofed, concrete cube with a couple of windows. A home I would hate looking at, and a home I would hate living in; a house I would not want to come home to. After all, I can live with other people's ugly architecture, it only offends my eye. Having no other choice but to live in ugly house; own an ugly house, would offend my very being.
    • 2/5
      I'm no fan of books on architectural criticism, but I am attracted by Tom Wolfe's prose. So, on a slow day, I read this. He doesn't like post-modernist Buildings. In a perfect world, I might care more.
    • 4/5
      I am reading this book 30 years too late, of course, so probably my opinion is pointless. Or perhaps Wolfe has written an updated version that I've missed. In any case, his basic argument that American architecture had been taken over by a bunch of Europeans and turned into an academic exercise that was designed only for other similarly-deluded (and borderline talentless) architects seems indisputable. One only has to look at New Haven's (thankfully demolished) Oriental Gardens, which looks like a trailer park gone terribly terribly wrong. Looking around, I'm not sure we've made much progress since then, however. One look at Reston, Virginia is enough to make anyone who loves buildings shed a tear. It isn't Bauhaus, but it is damned ugly!
    • 4/5
      Loved it--an essay about navel gazing and what happens when groups of people navel-gaze and gather together to prove which one of them is more perfect at navel-gazing. Wolfe critiques modern architecture, but it isn't just about the negative effects of the Bauhaus style as much as the dangerousness of a group of people who attempt to rid themselves of pesky intellectual and moreover, ideological, competition. You don't have to hate modern or post modern architecture to like the book, but it probably doesn't hurt if you are a bit of an iconoclast.
    • 2/5
      Tom Wolfe's short work, From Bauhaus to Our House, is little more than a screed against the excesses of modern architecture. While agreeing with many of his conclusions, I found the style and tone of the book to be inappropriate for the purpose of serious art/architecture criticism. Written in 1981, it seems dated with a quarter century of architectural progress having occurred since it was published. There are references to other art forms, music in particular, that demonstrate an unfamiliarity with the material. The result of these references led me to question Wolfe's knowledge of architecture. While Wolfe has been one of my favorite authors with works like The Right Stuff and A Man in Full, this book will not be placed together with those favorites. An alternative for those who are interested in the spirit of twentieth century architecture may be found in the work of Louis Kahn.
    • 4/5
      This is an amusing, long essay about the rise of Bauhaus architecture. Wolfe adopts a sarcastic tone and challenges the "glass box" style of architecture. I found this to be very informative and interesting.
    • 3/5
      I don't know much about architecture so it was fun to read Wolfe's take on why we ended up with so much steel and glass in our cities. Gropius is explained and how the intelligensia fell over themselves to reproduce the austerity of marxist functionality in new materials as part of a post-modern frenzy. With Tom Wolfe the fascination is, as ever, not about what he says but the cool, stylised way in which he says it. Witty and luxurious prose.

    Book preview

    From Bauhaus to Our House - Tom Wolfe

    chapter I

    The Silver Prince

    OUR STORY BEGINS IN GERMANY JUST AFTER THE FIRST World War. Young American architects, along with artists, writers, and odd-lot intellectuals, are roaming through Europe. This great boho adventure is called the Lost Generation. Meaning what? In The Liberation of American Literature, V. F. Calverton wrote that American artists and writers had suffered from a colonial complex throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had timidly imitated European models—but that after World War I they had finally found the self-confidence and sense of identity to break free of the authority of Europe in the arts. In fact, he couldn’t have gotten it more hopelessly turned around.

    The motto of the Lost Generation was, in Malcolm Cowley’s words, They do things better in Europe. What was in progress was a postwar discount tour in which practically any American—not just, as in the old days, a Henry James, a John Singer Sargent, or a Richard Morris Hunt—could go abroad and learn how to be a European artist. The colonial complex now took hold like a full nelson.

    The European artist! What a dazzling figure! André Breton, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Picasso, Matisse, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Valéry—such creatures stood out like Gustave Miklos figurines of bronze and gold against the smoking rubble of Europe after the Great War. The rubble, the ruins of European civilization, was an essential part of the picture. The charred bone heap in the background was precisely what made an avant-gardist such as Breton or Picasso stand out so brilliantly.

    To the young American architects who made the pilgrimage, the most dazzling figure of all was Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Gropius opened the Bauhaus in Weimar, the German capital, in 1919. It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus. Gropius, the Epicurus of the piece, was thirty-six years old, slender, simply but meticulously groomed, with his thick black hair combed straight back, irresistibly handsome to women, correct and urbane in a classic German manner, a lieutenant of cavalry during the war, decorated for valor, a figure of calm, certitude, and conviction at the center of the maelstrom.

    Strictly speaking, he was not an aristocrat, since his father, while well-to-do, was not of the nobility, but people couldn’t help thinking of him as one. The painter Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus, called Gropius the Silver Prince. Silver was perfect. Gold was too gaudy for so fine and precise a man. Gropius seemed to be an aristocrat who through a miracle of sensitivity had retained every virtue of the breed and cast off all the snobberies and dead weight of the

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