From Bauhaus to Our House

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
From Bauhaus to Our House
OCLC
7734777

From Bauhaus to Our House is a 1981 narrative of Modern architecture, written by Tom Wolfe.

Background

In 1975 Wolfe made his first foray into art criticism with The Painted Word, in which he argued that art theory had become too pervasive because the art world was controlled by a small elitist network of wealthy collectors, dealers and critics. Art critics were, in turn, highly critical of Wolfe's book, arguing that he was a philistine who knew nothing of what he wrote.[1]

After The Painted Word, Wolfe published a collection of his essays,

Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1981.[2]

Themes

IBM Plaza
.

Wolfe bluntly lays out his thesis in the introduction to From Bauhaus to Our House with a riff on the patriotic song "America the Beautiful"

O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?[3]

Wolfe criticizes the tendencies of modern architecture to avoid any external ornamentation. Wolfe praised architects like

Modern Architecture exemplified by architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius (the founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany, whose ideas influenced Modern Architecture, and from which the title of the book derives). Wolfe believed that the buildings of the International Style and Modern Architecture could barely be appreciated by those who had to work in them.[4]

Wolfe's critique, however, was not purely aesthetic. As in The Painted Word Wolfe was critical of what he saw as too much adherence to theory. Wolfe characterized the architecture as based on a political philosophy that was inapplicable to America, arguing, for example, that it was silly to model American schools on "worker's flats" for the proletariat. The architecture world—like an art world dominated by critics, and a literature world dominated by creative writing programs—was producing buildings that nobody liked.[5] Many architects, in Wolfe's opinion, had no particular goal but to be the most avant-garde.[6]

Critical response

As Wolfe's arguments mirrored those he made in

Time critic Robert Hughes wrote that Wolfe had added nothing to the discussion of modern architecture except "a kind of supercilious rancor and a free-floating hostility toward the intelligentsia".[7][8] The architectural and urban critic Michael Sorkin noted, "What Tom Wolfe doesn't know about modern architecture could fill a book. And so indeed it has, albeit a slim one."[9]

Matisse and that the exhibition occurred in 1932 while the architecture itself remained uncommon for another 20 years.[10]

Some critics conceded that Wolfe was right that many people did not appreciate the buildings.

Times Literary Supplement observed that perhaps some people felt such hostility to architecture because it is "a gallery we can't walk out of, a book we can't close, and art we can't even turn our backs on because it is there facing us on the other side of the street".[6][11]

Others noted that, regardless of whether Wolfe was right or wrong, architecture was already moving away from Modern architecture to Postmodern architecture. Many of the complaints that Wolfe lodged against Modern architecture, particularly the austere boxiness of the buildings, were no longer a facet of postmodern architecture.[12]

Critics observed that the book was well written. Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Wolfe's agility continues to dazzle, more than fourteen years after his essays first began to appear in print. But dazzle is not history, or architectural criticism, or even social criticism, and it is certainly not an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between architecture and society."[13][14]

References

General
Specific
  1. ^ Ragen 2002, pp. 23–24
  2. ^ Ragen 2002, pp. 24–28
  3. ^ "From Bauhaus to Our House". tomwolfe.com. Retrieved 2007-12-08.
  4. ^ Ragen 2002, pp. 28–29
  5. ^ Ragen 2002, pp. 29
  6. ^ a b Grier, Peter (December 14, 1981). "Wolfe: Tilting His Lance at the Glass Box". The Christian Science Monitor. In Shomette 1992.
  7. ^ Shomette 1992, pp. xxii–xxiii
  8. ^ Forgey, Benjamin (November 15, 1981). "Tom Wolfe Behind the Facade of Modernism". Book World. The Washington Post. In Shomette 1992.
  9. ^ "Tom Wolfe: The Great Gadfly". The New York Times. 20 December 1981.
  10. Saturday Review. 8: 65–66. In Shomette 1992
    .
  11. Times Literary Supplement. In Shomette 1992
    .
  12. JSTOR 2779029
    .
  13. ^ Goldberger, Paul (October 11, 1981). "From Bauhaus to Our House". The New York Times. Retrieved 2007-12-09.
  14. doi:10.1086/227929. In Shomette 1992
    .

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House&oldid=1080469386"