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Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau

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Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau are World Heritage Sites in Germany , comprising six separate sites which are associated with the Bauhaus art school. It was designated in 1996 with four initial sites, and in 2017 two further sites were added.

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130-526: The Bauhaus was only in operation from 1919 until 1933 and it educated no more than 1,250 students, of whom only 155 actually graduated with a Bauhaus Diploma. Nevertheless, the school revolutionized 20th century architectural and aesthetic thinking and practice. "[The] buildings designed by the masters of the Bauhaus are fundamental representatives of Classical Modernism ... For this reason, they are important monuments not only for art and culture, but also for

260-723: A higher power and meaning in the world. Modernism often yearns for a romantic or metaphysical centre, but later finds its collapse. This distinction between modernism and romanticism extends to their respective treatments of 'symbol'. The romantics at times see an essential relation (the 'ground') between the symbol (or the 'vehicle', in I.A. Richards 's terms) and its 'tenor' (its meaning)—for example in Coleridge's description of nature as 'that eternal language which thy God / Utters'. But while some romantics may have perceived nature and its symbols as God's language, for other romantic theorists it remains inscrutable. As Goethe (not himself

390-567: A mystical approach to suggest a non-rational sense of meaning. For these reasons, modernist metaphors may be unnatural, as for instance in T.S. Eliot's description of an evening 'spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table'. Similarly, for many later modernist poets nature is unnaturalized and at times mechanized, as for example in Stephen Oliver's image of the moon busily 'hoisting' itself into consciousness. Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against

520-475: A "growing alienation " from prevailing " morality , optimism , and convention " and a desire to change how " human beings in a society interact and live together ". The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture , including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and

650-720: A "masterpiece of poetic functionalism". The school opened on 4 May 1930. It could accommodate 120 trainees. The complex has had various uses, including being the Reich Leadership School, where elite members of the Gestapo and SS were trained from 1933 until the end of World War II. It was restored between 2005 and 2007, and since then it has been used as an education centre by the Handwerkskammer Berlin (Berlin Chamber of Skilled Crafts). In 2008

780-681: A Circle ), which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1912, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first (and only) major Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme" , published in time for the Salon de la Section d'Or , the largest Cubist exhibition to date. In 1912 Metzinger painted and exhibited his enchanting La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) and Danseuse au Café ( Dancer in a Café ) . Albert Gleizes painted and exhibited his Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) and his monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons ( Harvest Threshing ). This work, along with La Ville de Paris ( City of Paris ) by Robert Delaunay ,

910-409: A conservative position. Some even argue that Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture that excluded the majority of the population. Surrealism , which originated in the early 1920s, came to be regarded by the public as the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism". The word "surrealist" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in

1040-594: A critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism . The movement also rejected the concept of absolute originality — the idea of "creation from nothingness" — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism , replacing it with techniques of collage , reprise , incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation , revision, and parody. Another feature of modernism was reflexivity about artistic and social convention, which led to experimentation highlighting how works of art are made as well as

1170-401: A direct means of accessing a higher reality. Modernism often rejects 19th-century realism when the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. Instead, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. For instance, Picasso's 1907 Proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon does not present its subjects from

1300-608: A journeyman before the weavers guild in Glauchau , Saxony in 1927. Later that year, she married fellow student, and architect, Alfred Arndt , who was appointed full-time master of the Bauhaus construction workshop in Dessau in 1929. Although no longer a student, Arndt remained active in Bauhaus events and enrolled in Walter Peterhan 's newly created photography course. Without full-time work, Arndt embraced photography as

1430-510: A library. It is a textbook example of Bauhaus functionalist architecture , both in the finished product and in the analytical and collaborative approach used develop the design and complete the project. Next to the Bauhaus Dessau building, it was the second largest project ever undertaken by the Bauhaus. It was designed to harmonise with the wooded, sloping site it occupies. The architectural historian Winfried Nerdinger described it as

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1560-425: A line from W. B. Yeats : "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in ' The Second Coming '). Modernists often search for a metaphysical 'centre' but experience its collapse. ( Postmodernism , by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, such as Jacques Derrida 's deconstruction of metaphysical claims.) Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to

1690-544: A means to stave off her boredom. In the next five years producing a series of 43 self-portraits as well as images of her friend Otti Berger . In 1932, the couple moved to Probstzella in Thuringia, where Alfred worked as a free-lance architect. In 1948 they settled in Soviet-occupied Darmstadt, and by 1950 were again in contact with other former Bauhaus members. In those post war years, interest in

1820-522: A revolutionary culture that included political revolution. In Russia after the 1917 Revolution , there was indeed initially a burgeoning of avant-garde cultural activity, which included Russian Futurism . However, others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. But many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot , rejected mass popular culture from

1950-507: A revolutionary prototype for modern living. In keeping with the Bauhaus philosophy of learning by practical experience, a number of staff and students were involved with the project, including Marcel Breuer , who was then a student, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher and László Moholy-Nagy . Every piece of furniture, including the lighting, was made in the Bauhaus workshops. It was included in the World Heritage site in 1996. Since August 2017

2080-442: A romantic) said, ‘the idea [or meaning] remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image’. This was extended in modernist theory which, drawing on its symbolist precursors, often emphasizes the inscrutability and failure of symbol and metaphor. For example, Wallace Stevens seeks and fails to find meaning in nature, even if he at times seems to sense such a meaning. As such, symbolists and modernists at times adopt

2210-462: A school for teaching women cooking and sewing, and just before the beginning of World War II in 1939, it became a training school for officers of the Nazi Party . In 1941 it housed the press department of the aircraft manufacturer Junkers . In 1945 the school was damaged in an air raid. After the war it was partially repaired to make it usable as an educational institution, but without respect to

2340-401: A science and culture centre, which included a collection of items from Bauhaus. Eighteen former Bauhaus students attended the ceremony. Bauhaus Dessau Foundation was founded in 1994 to research and preserve the heritage of the Bauhaus. The building was inscribed as part of the World Heritage site in 1996, after which extensive renovations were carried out. These were completed in 2006. Today

2470-490: A single point of view, instead presenting a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . The Poet of 1911 is similarly decentered, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection comments, "Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image." Modernism, with its sense that "things fall apart,"

2600-406: A struggle with the sense of nature's significance, falling under two headings: poems in which the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end of the poem; and poems in which the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end of the poem. Modernism often rejects nineteenth century realism , if the latter is understood as focusing on

2730-732: A student at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Erfurt . Her interest in photography developed while serving at an architectural office in Erfurt, where she learned darkroom techniques and began taking photographs of local buildings. None of these early photographs exist. Thanks to a scholarship, she was a student at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1927, where she studied under László Moholy-Nagy , Wassily Kandinsky , and Paul Klee . Arndt had initially hoped to study architecture, however, she felt lost as

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2860-503: A teaching facility, but tours of the exterior and interior of the site are offered by the Bauhaus University Weimar. The Haus am Horn is a domestic house made of concrete and steel built for the first exhibition of work by the Bauhaus in 1923. The building was based on designs by Georg Muche , a painter and teacher at the school. It was the first building based entirely on Bauhaus design principles and it presented

2990-427: A tonal center. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne , which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne . In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent

3120-425: A way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of modernist works in the opening decade of the 20th century. Although their authors considered them to be extensions of existing trends in art, these works broke the implicit understanding the general public had of art: that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include

3250-481: Is among the first skyscrapers in the world. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958) is often regarded as the pinnacle of this modernist high-rise architecture. Many aspects of modernist design persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture , though previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama. In 1913—which

3380-788: Is another modernist movement. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F. T. Marinetti 's first manifesto. Soon afterward, a group of painters ( Giacomo Balla , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Luigi Russolo , and Gino Severini ) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto . Modeled on Marx and Engels ' famous " Communist Manifesto " (1848), such manifestos put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. However, arguments in favor of geometric or purely abstract painting were, at this time, largely confined to "little magazines" which had only tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, and

3510-537: Is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in The New Yorker , which are considered to be the first examples of surrealist humor in America. Modern ideas in art also began to appear more frequently in commercials and logos, an early example of which, from 1916, is the famous London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston . One of

3640-483: Is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream-of-consciousness technique , but Robert Humphrey comments that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel." Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation, and it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

3770-534: Is often seen as the apotheosis of Romanticism. As August Wilhelm Schlegel, an early German Romantic, described it, while Romanticism searches for metaphysical truths about character, nature, higher power , and meaning in the world, modernism, although yearning for such a metaphysical center, only finds its collapse. In the context of the Industrial Revolution (~1760–1840), influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization , especially

3900-459: Is similarly decentred, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website puts it, 'Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image'. Modernism, with its sense that 'things fall apart,' can be seen as the apotheosis of romanticism , if romanticism is the (often frustrated) quest for metaphysical truths about character, nature,

4030-479: The Dessauer Spar- und Baugenossenschaft , a housing cooperative . It ordered the work at the beginning of 1930 and all five buildings were already finished by August of the same year. The construction costs were RM 8,000 per apartment. Although the co-operative wanted the apartments to be inexpensive, it also wanted them to be well equipped and reasonably comfortable. The rent was to be controlled so that it

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4160-687: The Art Nouveau style by Henry van de Velde . These are: The Van de Velde building has reconstructed murals by Oskar Schlemmer , originally created for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition, and it is noted for the unconventional lighting of its central stairwell. The Main Building was restored by the German architect Thomas van den Valentyn in 1999. It has a sinuous, elliptical Art Nouveau main staircase. Walter Gropius' former office has been refitted with reconstructed furniture, fittings, and carpets. After

4290-537: The Hecatomb of the First World War — disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence ." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality" in which individuals believed they could transcend their mortality and eventually that they would cease to be victims of history to instead become its creators. Literary modernism is often summed up in

4420-516: The Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art that encompassed

4550-488: The avant-garde of various arts and disciplines. It is also often perceived, especially in the West, as a socially progressive movement that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology. From this perspective, modernism encourages the re-examination of every aspect of existence. Modernists analyze topics to find

4680-617: The capitalist system and that workers are anything but free led to the formulation of Marxist theory . Art historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Historian William Everdell argued that modernism began in the 1870s when metaphorical (or ontological ) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind 's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut and Ludwig Boltzmann 's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics . Everdell also believed modernism in painting began in 1885–1886 with post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat 's development of Divisionism ,

4810-658: The neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky —which rejected popular solutions to modern problems), the rise of fascism , the Great Depression , and the march to war helped to radicalize a generation. Bertolt Brecht , W. H. Auden , André Breton , Louis Aragon , and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist form of Marxism. There were, however, also modernists explicitly of 'the right', including Salvador Dalí , Wyndham Lewis , T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,

4940-686: The " stream of consciousness " technique, such as Dorothy Richardson , James Joyce , and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital , the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything." His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition , though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. Important literary precursors of modernism included esteemed writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), whose novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who published

5070-470: The " will to power " ( Wille zur macht ), were of central importance: "Nietzsche often identified life itself with 'will to power', that is, with an instinct for growth and durability." Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective human experience of time. His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on 20th-century novelists" especially those modernists who used

5200-614: The "dots" used to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . On the other hand, visual art critic Clement Greenberg called German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real modernist", although he also wrote, "What can be safely called modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), too, in prose fiction. (It

5330-439: The (perceived) erosion of an overarching ' nomos ', or 'sacred canopy', under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity". Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as " Expressionism , Futurism , Vitalism , Theosophy , Psychoanalysis , Nudism , Eugenics , Utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance , Bolshevism , Organic Nationalism — and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained

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5460-478: The 1860s, two approaches in the arts and letters developed separately in France. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done not in studios, but outdoors ( en plein air ). Impressionist paintings attempted to convey that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from

5590-467: The 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt Brecht and Federico García Lorca . D. H. Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of William Faulkner 's The Sound and the Fury in 1929. In the 1930s, in addition to further major works by Faulkner, Samuel Beckett published his first major work,

5720-743: The 1920s until the 1950s. While modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore , William Carlos Williams , H.D. , and Louis Zukofsky , there were important British modernist poets, including David Jones , Hugh MacDiarmid , Basil Bunting , and W. H. Auden . European modernist poets include Federico García Lorca , Anna Akhmatova , Constantine Cavafy , and Paul Valéry . The modernist movement continued during this period in Soviet Russia . In 1930 composer Dimitri Shostakovich 's (1906–1975) opera The Nose

5850-659: The 1930s. Between 1930 and 1932 composer Arnold Schoenberg worked on Moses und Aron , one of the first operas to make use of the twelve-tone technique, Pablo Picasso painted in 1937 Guernica , his cubist condemnation of fascism , while in 1939 James Joyce pushed the boundaries of the modern novel further with Finnegans Wake . Also by 1930 modernism began to influence mainstream culture, so that, for example, The New Yorker magazine began publishing work, influenced by modernism, by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker , Robert Benchley , E. B. White , S. J. Perelman , and James Thurber , amongst others. Perelman

5980-530: The 1980s, has been compared to that of her contemporaries Marta Astfalck-Vietz and Claude Cahun . Over the five years when she took an active interest in photography, she captured herself and her friends in various styles, costumes and settings in the series known as Maskenportäts (Masked Portraits). Although at the time Arndt refused to attribute any deep artistic meaning to her photographs, they were imaginative and provocative. Through her costumes, Arndt created playful reinterpretations of such feminine tropes as

6110-623: The 19th century. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but in fact oftentimes opposed, and that society's current values were antithetical to further progress; therefore, civilization could not move forward in its present form. Early in the century, the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) ( The World as Will and Representation , 1819/20) called into question previous optimism. His ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Similarly, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Nietzsche both later rejected

6240-512: The Bauhaus director, converted some studios into classrooms. The building was renovated in 2006 to return it to its original layout. The studios are now let as tourist accommodation. Due to political pressure, the Bauhaus Dessau closed in 1932 and Mies van der Rohe set up a privately funded Bauhaus in Berlin, although this also closed after less than a year. The Bauhaus building in Dessau was used as

6370-468: The Bauhaus in Weimar closed, the buildings were used by a number of successor arts-related educational institutions. Today, after various mergers, restructurings, and renamings, the present day Bauhaus-Universität Weimar , founded in 1996, operates on the former Bauhaus site, teaching art, design, and technology-related courses. The site was designated a World Heritage Site in 1996. The buildings operate as

6500-580: The Bauhaus quickly rose again. In 1979 Arndt received international acclaim when her photographs were exhibited at Museum Folkwang . She returned to Dessau in 1994, invited by the Vorwerk company to discuss new line of rugs based on designs exclusively by women. Gertud Arndt died in July 2000 at the age of ninety-six. Ever playful, she suggested that her friends and family "celebrate a joyful Bauhaus party" after her death. Arndt's photography, forgotten until

6630-422: The Bauhaus's ideas, in which the functionality and aesthetics of the design coalesce to form a single entity". The building was commissioned by the city of Dessau, who financed the project and provided the building plot. The plans were drafted by Gropius's architectural firm as the Bauhaus did not have its own architecture department until 1927, but the interior fittings were made in the Bauhaus workshops. Gropius

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6760-485: The Dutch author Menno ter Braak and others. Significant modernist literary works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf , Robert Musil , and Dorothy Richardson . The American modernist dramatist Eugene O'Neill 's career began in 1914, but his major works appeared in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant modernist dramatists writing in

6890-712: The German Nazarenes ). The Pre-Raphaelites foreshadowed Manet (1832–1883), with whom modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough." Two of the most significant thinkers of the mid-19th century were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), author of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867). Despite coming from different fields, both of their theories threatened

7020-549: The Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theater, which opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna . The extreme simplification of characters to mythic types , choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity would become characteristic of later Expressionist plays. The first full-length Expressionist play was The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which was published in 1914 and first performed in 1916. Futurism

7150-501: The Impressionist Claude Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen ( Murderer, Hope of Women ), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F sharp minor (1908), his first composition without

7280-614: The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another. We only experience the ' constant conjunction ' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'. Similarly, Hume argued that we never know the self as object, only the self as subject, and we are thus blind to our true natures. Moreover, if we only 'know' through sensory experience—such as sight, touch and feeling—then we cannot 'know' and neither can we make metaphysical claims. Thus, modernism can be driven emotionally by

7410-533: The World Heritage Site in July 2017. The ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau bei Berlin is a training centre campus built 1928–1930. It was designed by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer in collaboration with Bauhaus students. It was constructed for the former Federation of German Trade Unions and it included seminar rooms, a dining hall, accommodation for trainees and teachers, sports facilities, and

7540-835: The architects Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten won the World Monuments Fund / Knoll Modernism prize for the restoration. ADGB Trade Union School was inscribed as part of the World Heritage Site in July 2017. The complex is not open to the general public, but the Stiftung Baudenkmal Bundeschule Bernau runs guided tours of the school in German. Modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction , and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in

7670-572: The atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg 's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of Cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , and others, in

7800-400: The auditorium, for seminars and conventions. The Meisterhäuser (Masters' houses) are a group of seven flat-roofed, cubic modernist houses about 600 metres from the Bauhaus Dessau building, designed by Walter Gropius for the senior staff of the Bauhaus. They were built in 1925–26 on commission from city of Dessau. They consisted of three pairs of semi-detached houses, and a detached house at

7930-474: The building has been owned by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar . In 2018–19 the house was closed to the public for a major restoration. It was reopened on 18 May 2019. The Bauhaus Dessau is one of the iconic buildings of the 20th century. It was designed by Walter Gropius and was officially opened on 4 December 1926, having taken just over a year to build. It is "regarded as a 'built manifesto' of

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8060-525: The city, including King's Cross station (1852) and Paddington Station (1854). These technological advances spread abroad, leading to later structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), the latter of which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. While such engineering feats radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and

8190-532: The coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 (World War I) and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world was drastically changed, and doubt was cast on the beliefs and institutions of the past. The failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth: before 1914, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost

8320-746: The cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation." More explicitly: the Expressionists rejected the ideology of realism. There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th-century German theater, of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge , Walter Hasenclever , Hans Henny Jahnn , and Arnolt Bronnen . They looked back to Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind as precursors of their dramaturgical experiments. Oskar Kokoschka 's Murderer,

8450-497: The daily lives of people, the human experience of time itself was altered with the development of the electric telegraph in 1837, as well as the adoption of " standard time " by British railway companies from 1845, a concept which would be adopted throughout the rest of the world over the next fifty years. Despite continuing technological advances, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that such advances were always good came under increasing attack in

8580-527: The dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." However, the relationship of modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar Peter Child's indicates: "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity, and despair." An example of how modernist art can apply older traditions while also incorporating new techniques can be found within

8710-552: The desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Some modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who believe that they have encountered some great truth about nature or character, truths that the novels themselves treat ironically while offering more mundane explanations. Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens convey

8840-673: The development of railways starting in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture they led to. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was the Crystal Palace , the huge cast-iron and plate-glass exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals throughout

8970-428: The door handles were designed so as to use a minimum amount of metal. The balconies were intended not only to provide economical and space saving access to the apartments, but to also facilitate social interaction between residents. The apartments all had central heating and bathrooms with terrazzo flooring and enamel baths, and were considered well appointed for social housing of the time. The apartments were built for

9100-570: The effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values. Literary scholar Gerald Graff , argues that, "The ground motive of modernism was criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and its world view; the modernists, carrying the torch of Romanticism." While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), one of the most notable landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement , his pioneering work in

9230-407: The embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. At the same time, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. Picasso's proto-cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (see picture above), does not present its subjects from a single point of view (that of a single viewer), but instead presents a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . 'The Poet' of 1911

9360-404: The end of the row for Gropius, the school director. The houses were built within a small pine wood, with the aim of respecting the character of the landscape. The houses were spacious; the detached director's house was 350 m, and others were over 250 m. They had terraces and studios, as the artist-teachers were expected to work from home as well as on the school premises. In each semi-detached pair,

9490-402: The established order. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness ; in particular, the notion that human beings are driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality . Meanwhile, Marx's arguments that there are fundamental contradictions within

9620-457: The expression communicated by her face and the accessories that framed it. In an interview as a nonagenarian, Arndt told Sabina Leßmann, "I am simply interested in the face, what does one make from a face? There you only need to open your eyes wide and already you are someone else. Isn't that true?" Today Arndt is considered to be a pioneer of female self-portraiture, her work echoing in that of Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle . In January 2013,

9750-478: The face of the senseless slaughter, described in works such as Erich Maria Remarque 's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore, modernism's view of reality, which had been a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s. In literature and visual art, some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly to make their art more vivid or to force the audience to take

9880-461: The founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Krafft-Ebing and other sexologists were influential in the early days of modernism. Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer , 1895). Central to Freud's thinking is the idea "of the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life", so that all subjective reality was based on

10010-444: The fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time. Wassily Kandinsky , Piet Mondrian , and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of

10140-590: The historic ideas of the 20th century." – Application for the extension of the UNESCO World Heritage Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar and Dessau , German delegation to UNESCO , December 2015. The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius and remained there until 1925 when it moved to Dessau due to political pressure. It was housed in two neighbouring buildings that had previously been two separate art schools, both designed in

10270-632: The history of the site. These and the other houses, which are open to the public, are managed by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. The Feininger house is the base of the Kurt Weill Centre, which promotes the work of the composer Kurt Weill , who came from Dessau. In 1932 the Trinkhalle kiosk  [ de ] , a refreshment kiosk, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was built on the corner of the director's house site and

10400-650: The horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages . Following this machine aesthetic , modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building, and the Wainwright Building , a 10-story office building completed in 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri , United States,

10530-501: The houses have the same layout, but they are turned at a 90 degree angle from each other, so they do not look symmetrical from the street. Along with their families, the original residents were: Lyonel Feininger and László Moholy-Nagy who lived next door to Gropius (although Feininger never taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau); Oskar Schlemmer and Georg Muche lived in the next pair of houses; Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee lived in

10660-510: The idea that reality could be understood through a purely objective lens, a rejection that had a significant influence on the development of existentialism and nihilism . Around 1850, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a group of English poets, painters, and art critics) began to challenge the dominant trends of industrial Victorian England in "opposition to technical skill without inspiration." They were influenced by

10790-468: The integrity of the building. It was not until 1972 that the East German government had the building listed as an historical monument. It underwent a restoration, led by Konrad Püschel , an architect who had trained at the Bauhaus. The glass curtain walling, auditorium, stage and cafeteria were restored. On 2 December 1976, 50 years after it first opened, the building was officially reopened for use as

10920-426: The interactions between basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Freud's description of subjective states involved an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions derived from social values. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) were another major precursor of modernism, with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically

11050-493: The interior of the houses, with a particular focus on recreating the original colour schemes. They were reopened on 17 April 2019. The restoration cost about 1.5 million Euros and involved detailed scientific analysis of traces of original paints. Over 100 colours were recreated. The Laubenganghäuser ('Houses with Balcony Access') are five blocks of apartment buildings, providing a total of 90 flats, in south Dessau which were built in 1930. They were designed by Hannes Meyer, who

11180-435: The last pair. Gropius and Maholy-Nagy fitted out their houses entirely with furniture designed by Marcel Breuer. Later residents included Hannes Meyer , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Josef and Anni Albers , Hinnerk Scheper and Alfred and Gertrud Arndt . From 1932, when the Bauhaus in Dessau closed, the houses were rented out to other tenants. In 1945, towards the end of World War II , the director's house and one wing of

11310-489: The mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a faith in progress and liberal optimism. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944), began with the assumption that color and shape , not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art. Western art had been, from

11440-482: The material from which they are created. Debate about the timeline of modernism continues, with some scholars arguing that it evolved into late modernism or high modernism . Postmodernism , meanwhile, rejects many of the principles of modernism. Modernism was a cultural movement that impacted the arts as well as the broader Zeitgeist . It is commonly described as a system of thought and behavior marked by self-consciousness or self-reference , prevalent within

11570-540: The most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon , the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. In 1863, the Salon des Refusés , created by Emperor Napoleon III , displayed all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists,

11700-502: The most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into the daily lives of ordinary people in Western Europe and North America. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for

11830-428: The music of the composer Arnold Schoenberg . On the one hand, he rejected traditional tonal harmony , the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided musical composition for at least a century and a half. Schoenberg believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound based on the use of twelve-note rows . Yet, while this was indeed a wholly new technique, its origins can be traced back to

11960-456: The nature of reality. They argued that since each viewer interprets art through their own subjective perspective, it can never convey the ultimate metaphysical truth that the Romantics sought. Nonetheless, the modernists did not completely reject the idea of art as a means of understanding the world. To them, it was a tool for challenging and disrupting the viewer's point of view, rather than as

12090-407: The neighbouring house, where Maholy-Nagy had lived, were destroyed in an air raid. In 1948 a standard suburban house was built on the site of the director's house. The other houses were occupied, but they were altered and eventually fell into considerable disrepair. The Meisterhäuser were restored in 1992 and added to the World Heritage site in 1996. The house built on the site of the director's house

12220-487: The north wing of the complex, where the vocational school was, is used by the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences , whose Dessau campus is next to the Bauhaus site. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation uses the rest of the building for its administration; housing a museum, a shop and the restored cafeteria; letting out the former student rooms as tourist accommodation; and hiring out other areas of the building, such as

12350-409: The novel Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared. This is written in a largely idiosyncratic language , consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. In poetry T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings , and Wallace Stevens were writing from

12480-553: The novelist Franz Kafka , poet Gottfried Benn , and novelist Alfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-Expressionists. What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which Expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and

12610-423: The ones they believe to be holding back progress , replacing them with new ways of reaching the same end. According to historian Roger Griffin , modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new". Griffin believed that modernism aspired to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting

12740-402: The only woman in the construction course. She instead enrolled in the weaving workshop, where she studied under the tutelage of Georg Muche and Günta Stölzl . She believed that studying weaving was the only way she could continue her studies at the Bauhaus as a woman. Her most famous carpet – which has not survived – lay in the office of Walter Gropius from 1924 onwards. She qualified as

12870-434: The poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855–1891); and August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor to modernism in works as early as The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Out of the collision of ideals derived from Romanticism and an attempt to find

13000-491: The preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias , which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. Major surrealists include Paul Éluard , Robert Desnos , Max Ernst , Hans Arp , Antonin Artaud , Raymond Queneau , Joan Miró , and Marcel Duchamp . By 1930, modernism had won a place in the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. Modernism continued to evolve during

13130-525: The priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language." Cabaret , which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, including the immediate precursors of film, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre , the beginning of the ironic monologue, and

13260-434: The products of consumer culture " kitsch ", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music , Hollywood , and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism. Some modernists saw themselves as part of

13390-430: The representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. Modernist architects and designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier , believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced

13520-436: The rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were subsequent Expressionist works. Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism , Vorticism , Cubism, Surrealism and Dada ." Richard Murphy also comments: "[The] search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging Expressionists," such as

13650-494: The search for newer means of cultural expression . Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation , industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I . Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art , literary stream-of-consciousness , cinematic montage , musical atonality and twelve-tonality , modernist architecture , and urban planning . Modernism took

13780-463: The stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in middle class North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children. Another strong influence at this time was Marxism . After the generally primitivistic/irrationalism aspect of pre-World War I modernism (which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions) and

13910-481: The study of light, color, and atmosphere "anticipated the French Impressionists " and therefore modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; though unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes." However, the modernists were critical of the Romantics' belief that art serves as a window into

14040-604: The subject in a greater context. Cubism was brought to the attention of the general public for the first time in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (held 21 April – 13 June). Jean Metzinger , Albert Gleizes , Henri Le Fauconnier , Robert Delaunay , Fernand Léger and Roger de La Fresnaye were shown together in Room 41, provoking a 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris and beyond. Also in 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis ( Picture with

14170-424: The term "Expressionism" did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Though initially mainly a German artistic movement, most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910 and 1930, most precursors of the movement were not German. Furthermore, there have been Expressionist writers of prose fiction, as well as non-German speaking Expressionist writers, and, while the movement had declined in Germany with

14300-582: The trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture , which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists reject such consumerist attitudes to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch . Greenberg labeled

14430-531: The use of non-load-bearing glass curtain walls, a further development to that used in the Fagus Factory , built 1911–1913, which Gropius and Adolf Meyer designed. Construction features such as columns and supporting joists can be seen in the interior of the building. The five-storey studio wing, the "Prellerhaus", with 28 studio flats, each 20 m2, provided accommodation for students and junior masters. Bathroom and kitchen facilities were communal and there

14560-485: The widow, socialite, and a little girl. Writing for Berlin Art Link, Angela Connor describes the images as "ranging from severe to absurd to playful." Arndt's photographic style itself was likewise unique, and defied the usual aspects of modernist photography, which often included extreme angles, constructivist mirroring, or geometric simplifications. Instead the viewer is confronted with Arndt head on, unable to ignore

14690-473: The work of Manet attracted attention and opened commercial doors to the movement. The second French school was symbolism , which literary historians see beginning with Charles Baudelaire and including the later poets Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) with Une Saison en Enfer ( A Season in Hell , 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed

14820-401: The work of earlier composers such as Franz Liszt , Richard Wagner , Gustav Mahler , Richard Strauss , and Max Reger . In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse caused much controversy and attracted great criticism with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings, though

14950-578: The writings of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain. Art critic Clement Greenberg described the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-modernists: "There the proto-modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-modernists,

15080-443: The years between 1900 and 1910. An important aspect of modernism is how it relates to tradition through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody in new forms. T. S. Eliot made significant comments on the relation of the artist to tradition, including: "[W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which

15210-433: Was a shared roof terrace. Sixteen of the studios had small balconies, whose regular symmetry characterises this wing of the building. Women lived on the first floor, the "ladies floor", whose residents included Gertrud Arndt , Marianne Brandt , Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers . There were 140 students in total, so most of them had to seek accommodation in the inner city area of Dessau. In 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , then

15340-413: Was a while later, and not so locally, that modernism appeared in music and architecture)." The poet Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil ) and the author Flaubert's Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. Baudelaire's essay " The Painter of Modern Life " (1863) inspired young artists to break away from tradition and innovate new ways of portraying their world in art. Beginning in

15470-578: Was first performed in 1935. Like Shostakovich, other composers faced difficulties in this period. Gertrud Arndt Gertrud Arndt ( née Hantschk; 20 September 1903 – 10 July 2000) was a German photographer and designer associated with the Bauhaus movement. She is remembered for her pioneering series of self-portraits from around 1930. Born Gertrud Hantschk in Ratibor (then Upper Silesia ) in September 1903, Arndt began her artistic studies as

15600-545: Was integrated into a two-metre wall surrounding the property. It survived the war but was pulled down in 1962. In 2014 the wall and the kiosk were rebuilt and from 2016 it resumed its former function selling drinks and snacks to the public. From 2016 to 2019 the Kandinsky/Klee houses were closed for a major restoration carried out by the Wüstenrot Foundation  [ de ] , to completely restore

15730-436: Was no more than a quarter of the occupant's income. All five apartment blocks still exist and they are still used as social housing. They were restored in the mid-1990s under historic protection criteria. Today they are owned and managed by the housing cooperative Wohnungsgenossenschaft Dessau eG . One apartment is restored to its original design and is open to the public. The Laubenganghäuser were inscribed as part of

15860-759: Was premiered, in which he uses a montage of different styles, including folk music , popular song and atonality. Among his influences was Alban Berg 's (1885–1935) opera Wozzeck (1925), which "had made a tremendous impression on Shostakovich when it was staged in Leningrad." However, from 1932 socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony. Alban Berg wrote another significant, though incomplete, modernist opera, Lulu , which premiered in 1937. Berg's Violin Concerto

15990-533: Was pulled down in 2011. In 2014, in order to restore the original rhythm and form of the whole Meisterhäuser ensemble, structures which represent the form of the former director's house and the Maholy-Nagy house were built on sites of the destroyed buildings. These were designed by the architectural firm Bruno Fioretti Marquez, with the interior layout by the artist Olaf Nicolai . The interiors of these structures are used as exhibition spaces, with information about

16120-417: Was required to incorporate two schools into the building; the Bauhaus design school and a municipal vocational school. The building consists of several interconnecting wings which are positioned asymmetrically. These are: a three-storey workshop wing; a three-storey vocational school; a two-storey administration wing; an auditorium, stage and cafeteria, and a five-story studio wing. The facade is characterised by

16250-428: Was still "progressive", it increasingly saw traditional forms and social arrangements as hindering progress and recast the artist as a revolutionary, engaged in overthrowing rather than enlightening society. Also in 1913, a less violent event occurred in France with the publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust 's important novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) ( In Search of Lost Time ). This

16380-540: Was the first to make full use of it in his short story "Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the brave") (1900). Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967). Other modernist novelists that are associated with the use of this narrative technique include James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Italo Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno (1923). However, with

16510-771: Was the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-war Cubist period. In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , formed Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the city of Dresden . This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky 's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky , Franz Marc , Paul Klee , and August Macke . However,

16640-711: Was the year of philosopher Edmund Husserl 's Ideas , physicist Niels Bohr 's quantized atom, Ezra Pound 's founding of imagism , the Armory Show in New York, and in Saint Petersburg the "first futurist opera", Mikhail Matyushin 's Victory over the Sun —another Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky , composed The Rite of Spring , a ballet that depicts human sacrifice and has a musical score full of dissonance and primitive rhythm. This caused an uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time, though modernism

16770-447: Was then director of the Bauhaus. They were built as social housing , with each 47 m (510 sq ft) apartment expected to house a family of up to four people, following Meyer's motto Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf ("People's needs rather than luxury consumption"). A key part of the design was to use all materials sparingly to save costs and to design the interiors to utilise the small space as effectively as possible. Even

16900-454: Was too high. The birth of a machine age, which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th century had now radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience altered basic assumptions, and a realistic depiction of life in the arts seemed inadequate when faced with the fantastically surreal nature of trench warfare . The view that mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous in

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