Talk about a plumb job.

After a six-month international search, the Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts has announced that it has selected a winning design for a new public toilet.

The house museum, the former family home of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, has long been a pilgrimage site for architecture and history buffs alike. But the five-acre property doesn’t have a permanent outdoor restroom; instead, when nature calls, visitors have to rely on a plastic portable toilet.

‘For decades, we were using a porta-potty,’ says Vin Cipolla, president and CEO of Historic New England, the organisation that runs and maintains the Gropius House site. ‘Our visitor experience team estimates that over 3,500 people a year use the porta-potty. That's just crazy.’

Given the historical significance of the 1938 modernist residence, Cipolla and his team knew a standard-issue water closet would not do. So in November, Historic New England launched a blind architecture competition, calling on the design community to come up with a Bauhaus-worthy bathroom. ‘The brief was to create this important visitor amenity and at the same time respect the historic Gropius site,’ Cipolla adds.

In total, Historic New England received 280 submissions from 40 different countries. But one design, from Isabel Strauss, an assistant professor of architecture at Smith College in western Massachusetts, was the clear winner.

Strauss proposed a minimal geometric volume that would echo the silhouette and scale of an adjacent garage. Unlike the garage, however, the structure is clad in fieldstone and oriented towards the surrounding forest, minimising the building’s visual impact on the Gropius House site while connecting users to nature.

‘I entered this competition because of my pure love for the Gropius House,’ Strauss said in a statement. ‘My design starts with what is already here, rather than imposing a completely new aesthetic, and draws on vernacular materials and reinterprets them through a contemporary lens.'

Five designs advanced to the final round – including proposals from teams as far away as Poland and Iran. But Strauss’s won out. ‘It's so elegant, but at the same time, highly legible,’ Cipolla said. As the winner, Strauss will receive a $5,000 cash prize and her design will be the subject of an exhibition at the site.

According to Cipolla, Historic New England will now undertake feasibility studies and work with preservation entities to bring the design to reality.

‘We are so totally thrilled and over the moon about the whole thing. It really did exceed expectations,’ he says – proof that, when it comes to the aid of a Bauhaus icon, architecture stans are flush with ideas.

Textile designer, weaver, writer and graphic artist, Anni Albers (1899-1994) was a pioneer of 20th-century modernism. Her work prompted a reconsideration of textiles as an art form – both in their functional roles and as wall hangings – and pushed the processes of printmaking into new territory. Like many of the 20th century’s most influential female designers, her work long existed in the shadow of her husband, the painter and colour theorist Josef Albers, but in recent years has come into sharper focus.

That renewed attention is reflected in the publication of her first major biography, written by cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber, who knew the Alberses personally and has served as executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for four decades. Drawing on extensive archival research and decades of personal contact, the book revisits Albers’ life and work, tracing how a material long associated with function became a vehicle for some of the 20th century’s most rigorous artistic thinking.

Rethinking weaving

Born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899, Albers grew up in a cultured and affluent household. Her father ran a successful furniture business, while her maternal grandfather founded Ullstein Verlag, then one of Europe’s largest publishing houses. Even as a teenager, Fox Weber notes, she was 'more curious and adventurous than most people…open to rebellion, to confronting the unexpected, and to living originally.'

She arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, part of a generation seeking new forms of expression in the unsettled years following the First World War. Like many women at the school, she was directed towards the weaving workshop. What followed was less an acceptance of constraint than a redefinition of it. Working with cotton, linen and jute, as well as metallic threads and horsehair, she approached weaving as a system – one grounded in logic, repetition and variation.

Her compositions, built from repeated lines and subtle shifts in tone, rejected representation in favour of abstraction, yet retained a physical immediacy. These were objects to be handled as much as seen. In doing so, Albers helped collapse the boundary between art and design, positioning textiles as a site of experimentation rather than decoration.

From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain

In 1925, she married Josef Albers, whom she had met at the Bauhaus. When the school closed under pressure from the Nazi regime in 1933 – faced with demands to abandon what it deemed 'degenerate' art – the pair were left without work. As conditions in Germany became increasingly precarious, particularly for Anni as a Jewish artist, an opportunity emerged through Philip Johnson, whom she had met during his visit to the Bauhaus. After a chance meeting in Berlin, Johnson returned to the United States and soon sent a telegram inviting the couple to join the newly established Black Mountain College in North Carolina. They arrived in New York in November 1933.

The move marked a dramatic shift in circumstances. Having lived comfortably in Berlin, the couple found themselves in modest conditions, supported by the college with accommodation and meals. Yet the environment proved formative. At Black Mountain, where they remained until 1949, Albers developed both her practice and her pedagogy. Her philosophy – grounded in clarity, discipline and responsiveness to material – was later set out in her book On Weaving (1965) and would go on to shape a generation of artists; later figures such as Sheila Hicks and Ruth Asawa have cited her as an influence.

Expanding the field

Albers’ circle extended across disciplines – from John Cage to Buckminster Fuller, as well as Bauhaus figures including Walter Gropius and Paul Klee – reflecting the cross-pollination that defined midcentury modernism. Her work drew on observation as much as theory, from Berlin interiors to the textures and colours of Mexico, which became a lasting influence.

During her time at Black Mountain, she also developed an experimental series of ‘hardware’ jewellery with student Alex Reed, using utilitarian materials such as paper clips, screws and sink fittings. Created in part in response to the loss of her family’s possessions during exile – her parents fled Germany in 1939 with little to their name, their jewellery either confiscated by Nazis or used to secure safe passage – the pieces challenged conventional notions of value and ornament. Though initially met with scepticism, they embodied a principle that ran through her wider practice: that meaning lies not in material worth, but in invention and perception.

In the transcript from a talk she gave to students in March 1942, she wrote: ‘To our surprise we found that though we used such common materials as bobby-pins or washers or stopper chains for our necklaces, they sometimes looked quite beautiful and even precious. To our greater surprise still, we found that other people liked them too. But our greatest surprise was that others, like ourselves, did not care about the value or lack of value of the materials we used, but enjoyed, instead of material value, that of surprise and inventiveness – a spiritual value.’

Her designs are now held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which played a pivotal role in her recognition. In 1945, the museum staged a small exhibition of modern textiles that included her work. Though modest in scale, it marked an important moment, signalling the growing significance of textiles within modern art. Four years later, in 1949, Albers was given a landmark solo exhibition – the institution’s first dedicated show for a textile artist, and only the second afforded to a woman.

Conceived with Philip Johnson and initiated by Edgar Kaufmann Jr, the exhibition presented woven works, room dividers and material studies that prioritised structure, tactility and invention over decoration. Installed with unusual clarity – floating furniture, suspended screens and rhythmic partitions – it emphasised the inherent qualities of materials, from raffia and cellophane to metal threads. A review in The New York Times described her as 'a fabric engineer', underscoring her position as both artist and innovator. Though understated at the time, the exhibition marked a turning point, helping to establish textiles as a serious medium within modern art.

New Haven and beyond

In 1950, Anni and Josef Albers moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef took up a teaching position at Yale University, becoming chair of the Department of Design. The move marked a shift from the experimental environment of Black Mountain College to a more established academic setting, while providing a stable base from which both could develop their work.

For Anni, this was a period of increasing independence. Her reputation continued to grow through the 1950s, with exhibitions across the United States, including a major touring show organised by MIT. At the same time, she expanded her practice beyond weaving, turning to printmaking in the early 1960s.

Her prints translated the logic of weaving into a new medium. Working across lithography, screenprinting and embossing, she developed compositions built from repeated lines, grids and subtle tonal variation. As in her textiles, structure remained central: image emerged through process rather than gesture, reinforcing her position as an artist for whom material and method were inseparable.

Legacy

Anni and Josef Albers worked well into the 1970s, remaining restless and curious throughout their later years. After Josef died in 1976, Anni devoted her attention to the stewardship of his legacy as well as her own practice – continuing her printmaking with Gemini G.E.L. and overseeing exhibitions of her work.

She died in 1994, yet her influence has only grown more visible in recent years, as contemporary designers and artists return to questions of material, process and the value of making. Retrospectives at the Gugggenheim Bilbao in 2017 and Tate Modern in 2018 put her work firmly into the spotlight once more. Another show at Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas followed in 2024, while just last year, Dedar launched five fabrics based on Albers' weavings with showcases in Milan and New York. If modernism often privileged the monumental and the industrial, her work offers another perspective, one that starts with a simple thread and works outward.

'Anni Albers: A Life' is released in the US on 28 April 2026 and in the UK on 23 June 2026.

Shop Anni Albers

Walter Gropius’ family home has turned heads ever since it sprang out of the Massachusetts countryside in 1938. With its glass brick walls, ribbon windows and daring exterior spiral staircase, it was the veritable embodiment of Gropius’ Bauhaus principles. In fact, upon its completion, some 1,000 onlookers showed up to examine this architectural curiosity.

Nearly 90 years later, the Gropius House continues to attract crowds; It’s been open to the public as a museum since the 1980s and is one of the most popular tourist sites run by Historic New England, the nonprofit that maintains the five-acre property. Tours frequently sell out.

There was, however, one thing that let the modernist icon down: its public toilet.

For years, the only outdoor facility available to guests has been a single portable toilet that abutts the Gropius family garage, which presently functions as a small visitor's centre.

‘It’s the standard-issue, off-the-truck, porta potty – it serves its purpose,’ says Vin Cipolla, president and CEO of Historic New England. ‘It's unexpectedly in the spirit of the house, in a way: it's highly functional.’

Still, Cipolla and his team knew they could do better. Today (13 November 2025), Historic New England has announced a juried architectural competition to design a new outdoor restroom at the Gropius House, one that improves the visitor experience by prioritising accessibility and blending in with the aesthetics of the site (much like the recently added facilities at Balkrishna V Doshi’s 1959 Institute of Indology in India, for example). Design professionals and students alike are encouraged to enter, as are interdisciplinary teams across architecture, landscape and industrial design.

‘The idea of inviting the design community into the conversation felt very compelling to us,’ Cipolla says. ‘It's too cool an opportunity to give up.’

Gropius and his second wife, Ise, moved to the United States in 1937 after the architect accepted a teaching position at Harvard. By then, the Bauhaus school he had founded had been shuttered by the Nazis, who deemed his teachings as degenerate.

A local philanthropist provided Gropius with the land and funds in Lincoln, Massachusetts to construct a home for his family. Though the home was modest in scale, ‘it fit our life like a glove’, Ise later recounted.

The house has four indoor bathrooms, one of which is available for tour guests to use. But the set-up has been less than ideal for visitors waiting for their tour slot, or for those exploring the landscaped grounds.

Competition entrants are encouraged to be creative (Cipolla is even amenable to modular, porta john-like ideas) but submissions must check a few boxes: there must be two toilets and two wash stations; it must remain near, or be an extension of the garage; it must abide by ADA regulations; and it should evoke the Bauhaus spirit of innovation. The winning team, set to be announced in March 2026, will receive a prize of $5,000, have their work included in the Gropius House archive and be given an exhibition on the site.

Gropius never set out specific tenets for the design of a commode, but the competition’s organisers hope that participants will be flush with Bauhaus-inspired ideas. To paraphrase the master himself: ‘A public toilet is like an umbrella: it functions best when open.’

Entries are due 6 February, 2026. For more information and deadlines, visit gropiuscompetition.info

Once a niche corner of the internet, the furniture resale market has surged over the past decade. Part of its appeal lies in a growing awareness that we need to consume less and value longevity over novelty. But there’s also something magnetic about a vintage Knoll credenza or Le Corbusier sofa – objects that carry the patina of time. There’s a particular appetite for modernist icons: the interior-sphere is positively brimming with Togo sofas, Eames lounge chairs and Arco floor lamps. Thankfully, a crop of online platforms has emerged to satiate the hunger for, perhaps, authenticity in an increasingly mass-produced world. As lovers of all things 20th century, we’ve compiled the best places to shop for vintage furniture online – marketplaces where interior designers and homeowners alike source second hand treasures that combine aesthetics with sustainability.

The best places to shop for second hand furniture online

1stDibs

One of the largest global marketplaces connecting collectors, designers and dealers with rare pieces, 1stDibs offers everything from mid-century modern furniture to designer decor and museum-quality antiques. The platform places a strong focus on provenance, partnering with galleries and experts to ensure authenticity, making it the go-to destination for investment-grade design rather than casual resale.

Chairish

Shoppers can browse everything from Hollywood Regency dressers and mid-century sideboards to art prints, mirrors, rugs and lighting on this curated resale marketplace. Chairish caters to both design professionals and design-loving consumers, positioning resale as a sustainable and stylish alternative to new production.

Etsy

Always a reliable resource for, well, almost anything, Etsy connects independent makers, collectors and vintage sellers with buyers worldwide. Among its vast inventory of decor, art, furniture, textiles and more, you can find everything from retro lamps to handmade ceramics – a marketplace that blends creative craftsmanship with accessible vintage resale.

Pamono

This Berlin-based platform Pamono specialises in vintage and contemporary design furniture, lighting and art, with a catalogue spanning iconic 20th-century designers, studios and decor. It’s a veritable treasure trove for quality-curated classics like Eames chairs, Murano glass lamps, Bauhaus-inspired desks and Scandinavian teak tables.

Curiouz

A contemporary resale platform for pre-owned design furniture, Curiouz offers listings of modern classics – think Knoll tables, Vitra chairs and sculptural lighting. Its clean, meticulous curation makes it a favourite among professionals and design aficionados alike, bridging sustainability and design through pre-loved furniture.

LOT

LOT positions itself as a modern resale gallery, offering design enthusiasts crafted and heritage furniture and objects. Its inventory includes mid-century seating, collectible ceramics, minimalist lighting and contemporary art, bridging design, sustainability and storytelling.

2nd Home

UK-based 2nd Home connects quality-conscious consumers with pre-owned pieces from the likes of Flos, Knoll, Carl Hansen and much more. Expect premium, designer furniture, lighting and accessories ranging from sofas and dining sets to floor lamps and statement décor.

Whoppah

This Dutch resale marketplace for pre-owned designer furniture, art and décor handles logistics, quality check and delivery, making it easy to trade contemporary European design at accessible prices. At Whoppah expect to find high-end interior icons like Ligne Roset sofas, Moooi lighting and Vitra chairs.

Vinterior

Vinterior is a UK marketplace connecting independent furniture dealers and vintage sellers with buyers on the hunt for the antique, retro and everything in between – with all pieces being fully authenticated and quality-checked. The platform focuses on extending the life of furniture through resale, helping consumers furnish their homes uniquely and sustainably.

Selency

France-based online marketplace Selency’s selection spans farmhouse tables, rattan chairs, mid-century storage and more – championing a cosy, character-filled home while promoting conscious consumption. Every vintage and second-hand item is hand-verified and sourced from private sellers or small boutiques.

Cherry Cargo

Cherry Cargo is a resale platform for high-end, second-hand modern classics. It specialises in design-led furniture and accessories, from sculptural seating and minimalist storage to artistic lighting and unique décor pieces.

IntOndo

This Italian vintage furniture marketplace connects European dealers and private sellers with global buyers. IntOndo's catalogue includes mid-century seating, art deco dressers, brass lighting, decorative glassware and much more, with an emphasis on Italian and continental design.

MCF Select

You’ll find design-forward pieces such as Italian sofas, marble tables, brass lighting and statement art at MCF Select – an online destination that serves design-discerning customers with a pre-owned luxury selection. With an emphasis on timeless design and craftsmanship as well as sustainability, it is a platform for collectors and homeowners alike.

AptDeco

This US-based marketplace simplifies the buying and selling of pre-owned furniture with secure payment, pickup and delivery. AptDeco users can shop for pieces from brands like Pottery Barn, Herman Miller and Article, spanning sofas, office chairs, tables, beds and decor, making good design sustainable and attainable.

Modernist architecture emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction against the ornamental styles of the Victorian era and Art Nouveau. Rejecting decoration, modernism prioritised function, embracing new technologies and materials that arose from the Industrial Revolution. It also responded to the growing need for housing as a result of urbanisation. This was architecture for a new century, employing new construction methods and a fresh aesthetic that addressed social, technological and cultural shifts.

A whistle-stop introduction to modernist architecture

Throughout the 20th century, modernism spawned distinct regional variants. Le Corbusier's five points of architecture (more on this below) came to define the International Style, which is probably what most people think of when they think of modernism, characterised by clean lines, a ‘truth to materials’, and hallmarks such as flat roofs, glass curtain walls and steel frames.

In Europe, the Bauhaus School emerged as a prominent source of modernist thinking, with offshoots including brutalist architecture. The United States became a major centre for modernism, developing variants such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School, California modernism and midcentury modernism. In Brazil and other equatorial regions, tropical modernism adapted the movement’s principles to local climates, while, in India, the quest for a postcolonial identity gave rise to its own iteration.

In the post-war period, modernist styles became the dominant aesthetic for institutional and civic buildings – known as late modernism (1950s-1970s). With the rise of minimalist modernism, which provided the blueprint for skyscrapers, and brutalism, which was often used in urban planning, the style faced mounting criticism for being sterile and monotonous. The architectural pendulum, as ever, began to swing back, sparking a renewed interest in complexity that heralded the rise of postmodernism.

Famous modernist architects

To tackle the long list of famous modernist architects, we have organised them by their continent of origin. This list is by no means exhaustive – modernism's vast and diverse nature means there will be many more – yet this is a strong starting point for the movement's most influential proponents.

Further, it reflects the societal imbalances of the 20th century – for instance, in terms of gender. Architecture has historically been a male-dominated profession, with women often pigeonholed into interiors or furniture design rather than building design. Recognition and attribution biases further obscured their contributions, frequently reducing their roles to collaboration or assistance.

Eurocentric aesthetic standards have also shaped the history of modernism, with Western movements often elevated as universal benchmarks, which is why we have chosen to represent a geographically diverse selection. That said, we have started with Europe, where modernism originated.

Europe

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Style: International style
Famous works: Villa Savoye; Unité d'Habitation; Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, all France; the city of Chandigarh, India

Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier viewed architecture as ‘a machine for living’, and was one of modernism’s most influential figures. He developed the ‘Five Points of Architecture’ – a set of principles advocating the use of pilotis (stilts), open floor plans, free façades, horizontal windows and rooftop gardens – which essentially constitutes the familiar modernist aesthetic. Le Corbusier is also known for the pivotal role he played in designing the Indian city of Chandigarh.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

Style: Bauhaus
Famous works: Bauhaus Dessau, Germany; Gropius House, USA

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany in 1919 (later forced to close by the Nazis in 1933). The movement embraced key modernist ideas such as form following function and simplicity in design, while also introducing distinctive concepts like the fusion of art and industry and the use of materials such as steel and glass. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, the art school’s HQ, is an iconic example of this architecture.

Alvar Aalto (1898-1976)

Style: Humanist modernism, organic architecture
Famous works: Paimio Sanatorium; Finlandia Hall, both Finland; Viipuri Library, Russia

Alvar Aalto was a Finnish architect and furniture designer who embraced functional modernist principles while humanising them through the use of natural materials – especially wood – and organic forms. His career coincided with Finland’s rapid industrialisation in the early 20th century, helping establish the style that he developed with his wife, Aino Aalto, as a blueprint for the Scandinavian modern aesthetic.

Eileen Gray (1878-1976)

Style: International style
Famous works: Villa E-1027; Tempe à Pailla, both France

Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray struggled to establish herself in a male-dominated field, but is now celebrated as one of the most important figures in 20th-century design. Her style blended art deco elegance with modernist functionality, exemplified in the E-1027 house in France, a minimalist villa featuring built-in furniture and sliding panels, which was incorrectly attributed to Le Corbusier for many years.

Lisbeth Sachs (1914-2002)

Style: Organic architecture, humanist modernism
Famous works: Summer House Strauss, Switzerland

The work of Lisbeth Sachs, one of the first registered female architects in Switzerland, is marked by an organic sensibility, with curvilinear forms, expressive materials and structural clarity. She created spaces where interior and exterior boundaries blur, exemplified in her 1976 project, the Summer House Strauss. Her long-overdue recognition culminated with a dedicated showcase at the Swiss Pavilion during this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale (2025).

Africa

Hassan Fathy (1900-1989)

Style: Vernacular modernism
Famous works: New Gourna Village, Egypt

Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy blended modernist principles with traditional building techniques, using indigenous materials such as mud brick and vernacular methods like Nubian vaults and passive cooling to achieve climate-responsive design. Culturally, Fathy sought to develop community-centered, affordable housing for rural, economically disadvantaged Egyptians. This philosophy is exemplified in New Gourna, a planned resettlement village near Luxor, designed in the 1940s.

Demas Nwoko (b. 1935)

Style: African modernism
Famous works: Dominican Institute, Nigeria

Demas Nwoko, a Nigerian architect, artist and designer, integrated indigenous African motifs, materials and crafts into modern architectural practices, challenging Western conventions. He viewed design as a force to positively shape the environment, seeking to create meaningful cultural and social spaces for African communities, such as the educational Dominican Institute, built in the 1970s.

Asia

Charles Correa (1930-2015)

Style: Contextual modernism
Famous works: Gandhi Memorial Museum; Kanchanjunga Apartments; Jawahar Kala Kendra, all India

Although he was born in Mozambique, Charles Correa is primarily associated with Indian architecture, with much of his work addressing urban planning challenges in the country and helping redefine national architecture in the post-independence era. His style fused traditional elements with modernist principles while adapting to local climate and culture. The Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad showcases Correa’s signature use of open spaces, natural light and ventilation.

Balkrishna Doshi (1927-2023)

Style: Humanist modernism, brutalism
Famous works: Indian Institute of Management; Aranya low-cost housing, both India

Balkrishna Doshi was profoundly influenced by mentors Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, but forged his own Indian interpretation of modernism. His work often featured elements suited to India’s climate, such as open courtyards, shaded terraces and natural ventilation. Awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018, Doshi was celebrated for his humanistic approach, which focuses on low-cost housing, communal spaces and sustainable urban design.

Geoffrey Bawa (1919-2003)

Style: Tropical modernism
Famous works: Kandalama Hotel; Lunuganga Estate; Sri Lankan parliament building, all Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa is widely regarded as the father of tropical modernism – an architectural style that merges modernist principles with the demands of tropical climates. His designs frequently blur the lines between indoor spaces and lush natural surroundings, featuring open plans and natural materials. Bawa’s work is climate-responsive, with examples including the Kandalama and Lunuganga hotels, where you can stay today.

Tadao Ando (b. 1941)

Style: Minimalist modernism
Famous works: Church of the Light; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum; Chichu Art Museum; the Koshino House; the Water Temple, all Japan

Tadao Ando buildings are generally minimalist sanctuaries crafted from exposed concrete with plenty of natural light and water features. His work reflects the Japanese Zen philosophy, with a focus on calm, contemplation and harmony with nature. Iconic projects like the Church of Light in Osaka and the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum redefined contemporary Japanese architecture.

Minnette de Silva (1918-1998)

Style: Tropical modernism
Famous works: Karunaratne House; Pieris House; Watapuluwa Housing Scheme, all Sri Lanka

Minette de Silva was the first Asian woman elected as an associate of RIBA. She blended modernist principles with crafts, materials and forms suited to the tropical climate of her native Sri Lanka, using, for example, methods such as rammed earth and wattle-and-daub and features like open courtyards, passive ventilation and adjustable partitions. De Silva’s work was largely overlooked due to the gender biases of the 20th-century architectural establishment, but her influence on figures like Geoffrey Bawa is being increasingly recognised.

North America

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

Style: Organic architecture, Prairie style
Famous works: Fallingwater, Pennsylvania; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Robie House, Chicago

Frank Lloyd Wright revolutionised American architecture over his 70-year career with his philosophy of organic architecture – buildings that harmonise with their natural surroundings. His Prairie style, prominent between 1900 and 1917, sought to create a distinctly American aesthetic inspired by the landscapes of the Midwest, featuring cantilevered roofs, open floor plans and horizontal lines. Beyond his Prairie homes, Wright’s celebrated works include Fallingwater, a masterclass in environmental integration.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Style: International Style, minimalist modernism
Famous works: Seagram Building (with Philip Johnson), New York; Crown Hall, Chicago

Though he was born in Germany, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe made his mark in the US after emigrating there, helping to define the glass-and-steel aesthetic that laid the foundation for the modern skyscraper. The Seagram Building became, in many ways, the global blueprint for corporate architecture. Credited with popularising the phrase ‘less is more’, van der Rohe’s designs are characterised by clean lines, open floor plans and light-filled, transparent spaces. Read more about Mies van der Rohe's life and works.

Richard Neutra (1892-1970)

Style: Mid-century modernism, California modernism
Famous works: Kaufmann Desert House; Lovell Health House, both California

Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra was a key figure in midcentury modernism, particularly in Southern California, where buildings such as the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs helped define the California modern style. His designs are sleek, light-filled and open plan, emphasising health, lifestyle and a connection with the outdoors through the use of glass and natural materials.

Louis Kahn (1901-1974)

Style: Monumental modernism
Famous works: Salk Institute, California; Kimbell Art Museum, Texas

Louis Kahn, recipient of both the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal, was renowned for his monumental, monolithic buildings that showcase their weight, materials and structure rather than concealing them. Kahn’s designs blend modernism with classical influences, characterised by geometric forms and materials like brick and concrete.

Charles and Ray Eames (1907-1978 and 1912-1988)

Style: Mid-century modernism
Famous works: Eames House, California

Perhaps two of the most influential figures in 20th-century design, married couple Charles and Ray Eames are renowned for their contributions to architecture, furniture and industrial design. Their use of new materials like moulded plywood and fibreglass combined functionality with aesthetics. The Eames House, built in 1949 in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, stands as a landmark of midcentury modern residential architecture.

South America

Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012)

Style: Brazilian modernism, sculptural modernism
Famous works: Civic buildings of Brasília; Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, both Brazil; United Nations Headquarters, US

Strongly influenced by Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer’s use of free-form concrete, often cast in sinuous curves that echoed the natural landscapes of Brazil, led some to dub him a ‘sculptor of monuments’. Along with urban planners Lúcio Costa and Joaquim Cardozo, Niemeyer helped design the new capital of Brasília in the 1950s, including the National Congress, the cathedral and the Palácio da Alborada.

Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992)

Style: Brazilian modernism, humanist modernism, brutalism
Famous works: SESC Pompéia; Glass House; São Paulo Museum of Art, all Brazil

Born in Italy, Lina Bo Bardi is celebrated for her contributions to Latin American architecture, particularly in Brazil, where she navigated challenges as both a foreigner and a woman. An advocate for architecture’s social potential, she created buildings marked by cultural and material sensitivity, blending brutalist forms with Brazilian vernacular influences.

Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900-1975)

Style: Regional modernism, brutalism
Famous works: Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas; Olympic Stadium, both Venezuela; Aula Magna, Mexico

Venezuelan but raised in Europe, Carlos Raúl Villanueva brought modernist ideals to Latin America, where he fused them with local cultural and climatic contexts. A defining concept in his work was the idea of ‘synthesis of the arts’, a belief that architecture should be integrated with painting, sculpture and other visual arts. Villanueva also drew from brutalism, with extensive use of reinforced concrete, and his projects often had a social dimension – he played a major role in shaping the urban fabric of cities like Caracas and Maracay.

The Shakers: A World in the Making

On 7 June 2025, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany will launch ‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’, which will run until 28 September. The exhibition will explore the enduring influence of the Shakers, a Protestant sect that originated in England in the mid-1700s, its members emigrating to the American colonies in 1774.

‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’, with an exhibition design by Milan-based studio Formafantasma (a winner at Wallpaper's 2025 Design Awards), will bring together over 150 original Shaker artefacts, as well as newly commissioned works by contemporary artists and designers, creating a dialogue between history and modern creativity.

One of the exhibition’s four sections, titled ‘I Don’t Want to be Remembered as a Chair’, argues that Shaker design should not be appreciated purely for its aesthetics but through the lens of the group’s religious and communal philosophy. Thus, ‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’ will examine how these values became a wellspring of inspiration for modern designers, and how the Shakers’ legacy continues to resonate in art and design today.

Today, ‘Shaker style’ has come to mean a number of things: design that is simple, minimalist and democratic; functional, practical and optimised; and that prioritises craftsmanship and, later, technology. Below, we explore how these principles are manifested in key 20th-century movements such as modernism and Bauhaus, which find their roots in the Shakers’ way of life.

How Shaker principles have informed modern design

Simplicity, minimalism and democratic design

The Shakers were, in many ways, ahead of their time, espousing egalitarian ideals and even institutionalising gender equality in the 1780s. These values extended to those with physical disabilities. The Shakers’ inclusive philosophy, explored in the exhibition through the work of artist Finnegan Shannon, was reflected in their architecture and design, which prioritised accessibility and simplicity – design for all, not just the elite.

This laid the groundwork for modernism, which emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction against the ornate styles of Victorian and art nouveau. Modernist designers preferred clean lines and rejected unnecessary decoration, intending for their work to be applicable across cultures and contexts. The likes of Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Charles and Ray Eames admired Shaker principles.

Bauhaus, which emerged in 1919, adopted similar ideals, with its clean lines and geometric shapes, avoiding ornamentation. Scandinavian design, too, bears the hallmarks of Shaker design, with its uncluttered, streamlined look (think Danish designer Hans Wegner’s iconic ‘Wishbone’ chair, as seen in this Swiss chalet, which has distinct echoes of Shaker seating). It also follows democratic ideals, aiming to create high-quality design for the many, distilled in the business model of Swedish stalwart Ikea.

Functionality, practicality and spatial optimisation

The importance that the Shakers placed on labour translated into designs that were functional: think ladder-back chairs, straight-legged tables, built-in cupboards, and efficient storage solutions such as wall-mounted rails, boxes and baskets. The Shakers were early adopters of serial furniture production; in the exhibition, in the section titled ‘When We Find a Good Thing, We Stick To It’, audiences can see examples of standardised and customisable Shaker chairs.

This element of Shaker design can be felt in Bauhaus, where decorative elements were minimised unless they served a function, and Scandinavian design, which seeks to create beauty from utility. Modernism sought to create efficient spaces and objects for modern life; the idea underpinning the ‘Eames Molded Plywood Chair’, for example, was that every element served a purpose. Modernism’s layouts, meanwhile, often used an optimised grid system.

‘The Shakers: A World in the Making’ uses furniture such as cabinets, chests of drawers and sewing desks to illustrate the community’s instinct towards orderliness, as codified in their 1821 and 1845 Millennial Laws, a body of teachings covering a wide range of aspects of Shaker life, including behaviour, dress and even how to climb stairs.

Craftsmanship, natural materials and openness to technology

The Shakers had a strong work ethic, which also translated into a focus on craftsmanship. In ‘I Don’t Want to be Remembered as a Chair’, the Shaker belief in labour as a form of worship is reinterpreted by artist and designer Chris Halstrøm through a large-scale embroidered artwork where each stitch is represented as a prayer.

The group’s emphasis on handmade quality resonated with the Arts and Crafts movements which took off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and valued natural materials, simple joinery and built-to-last construction. The idea is also felt in Scandinavian design, where quality is paramount; this movement also, like the Shakers, favours organic materials such as wood, leather, linen, and stone.

Despite their insular communities, the Shakers were open to outside influences. The exhibition’s ‘Every Force Evolves a Form’ section traces how they interacted with the advancements of the wider world, showcasing oval boxes and rudimentary power tools. In ‘The Place Just Right’, audiences can see a radio that belonged to the Shaker community in Canterbury, Connecticut, as well as musical artefacts such as a metronome (music was a big part of Shaker life; they gained their moniker through the worshipful dance for which they were known). Shaker innovation is also explored through a commission from Christien Meindertsma, who reimagines their basketry as a biodegradable coffin.

Like the Shakers, later design movements such as modernism and Bauhaus embraced technological progress, especially industrial production, as a means of improving everyday life.

Full exhibition details at vitradesignmuseum.de

The cover of the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto featured an expressionist woodcut of a Gothic cathedral with dazzling stars shooting beams from its towers. Drawn by Bauhaus founder architect Walter Gropius, the manifesto kicked off with the phrase ‘The ultimate goal of all art is the building.'

Yet the Bauhaus, which has come to represent more than anything a style of stripped, modernist, functional architecture, did not initially even have an architecture department. It is only one of a plethora of paradoxes about the most famous art school ever. The Bauhaus, we have to remember, was never just one thing.

What is Bauhaus architecture?

Founded in the wake of the devastation of the First World War, which left Germany beaten, impoverished, shamed and traumatised, Bauhaus was intended as a new guild, based on a medieval model in which the crafts could be unified to serve a modern agenda. The cathedral on that cover represented the zenith of the western Gesamtkunstwerk (a 'total work of art' in German), a building that embodied symbolism and meaning, stonework, applied arts, geometry and collaboration.

Today, though, when we think of Bauhaus, we probably think of a particular style; the white villas of the 1920s and 30s, rigorous blocks of repetitive flats or the tubular chairs of Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. We might also think of all the things that the word ‘Bauhaus’ is applied to, the modernist apartment blocks of Stuttgart, Budapest, Bucharest or Tel Aviv.

Bauhaus: its origins and scope

If the Bauhaus is known for control, perfection and modernist minimalism, its beginnings were surprisingly diverse and a little chaotic. There was the abstraction of artists Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, the pottery, ceramics and textiles of the women designers who were excluded from the art studios and furniture workshops, which were the preserve of males, and there was photography, metalwork, theatre and graphics and more. Its beginnings were steeped not in functionalism but in mysticism, in the cultish atmosphere of devotion, such as the monkish demeanour of painter and designer Johannes Itten with his occult leanings and adherence to the odd pseudo-religion of Mazdaznan (a movement aiming to elevate consciousness through body and spirit). It only slowly shed these more eclectic leanings as director Gropius pursued a more rigorous line towards modernist architecture and design.

Over the course of the 1920s, the school began to shift towards a more architectural approach and by the time Hannes Meyer and later Mies van der Rohe were in charge (1928-1933), architecture had become firmly established as its key legacy.

Bauhaus manages to be both a badge of honour and an insult. To those who love it, it is the pinnacle of modernism; pure, clear, honest, revolutionary and functional. For others, it exemplifies the pretension, arrogance, inhumanity and fakery of modern architecture.

In architecture, its features have become cliché yet still often look astonishingly modern. Take the Bauhaus building itself. Designed by Walter Gropius in Dessau (where the school had moved to from Weimar) in 1925-26, it was intended to look industrial; a factory of ideas and images as well as production. The glass curtain walls dematerialised its presence while creating light-filled interiors, another element appears as a bridge, seemingly floating over a central spine route, similarly light and airy.

Ribbon windows accentuate its horizontality, indicating the direction of travel within the building. On one wall, a grid of small balconies casts a photogenic pattern of shadows and appears almost like diving boards from which to launch into the future. Materials are concrete, steel and glass (at least, they are made to appear to be). It is a building which, a century after it was designed, still looks contemporary, and that is because the Bauhaus defined our idea of what modern should look like.

We might also look at the Masters’ Houses (1925, Gropius again) designed for his colleagues, Marcel Breuer, Klee and Kandinsky. They are blocky, asymmetric and Constructivist, revelling in their composition as apparently abstract architectural sculptures which are actually meticulously designed to suit their purposes, expressing the volumes inside. They remain, in a way, the model for modernist villas, with roof decks, nautical railings and blocky, boxy forms. And, perhaps most of all, white walls. The white expressed a new purity of form, a departure from the grey tones of the dirty, polluted city into an idealised perfection, architecture as clean and full of potential as a crisp new sheet of paper.

The material was supposed to be concrete, that protean matter which could be moulded into any modern form. In fact, it was mostly brick, rendered with plaster to look modern. Concrete was still expensive and rare. Brick and block were cheap and ubiquitous. Here, we see something of the Bauhaus that was so often parodied, a willingness to sacrifice actual integrity for the appearance of integrity. Mies van der Rohe was also later parodied for sticking steel I-beams onto the outsides of his buildings because he’d had to cover up the real structural elements for fireproofing. For a movement steeped in ideas about morality, it was notably willing to compromise.

Just as the furniture, the bent steel tubes and glass were intended to appear mass-produced, fit for the mechanical age, but were actually made by craftsmen creating expensive handmade pieces. The architecture was about an idea of mass production aimed at a model of worker housing, but made by hand.

At the heart of the Bauhaus was an idea of design for all, of design as a force for social good the ultimate goal of which was the creation of a new, more equitable world of decent housing for the working classes, of green spaces and efficient buildings, well-lit, well-ventilated and fit for a new openness of everyday life. It posed the ending of compartmented, small, dark rooms for open plan spaces and balconies and roof terraces. It promoted communal dining rooms and facilities, a new way of living together with the Bauhaus school in Dessau as its model. It was socially deterministic in a manner that has become deeply unfashionable - the suggestion was that architects could mould society through their buildings to become better.

There were many experiments, most notably the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart (1927) with its mass of model housing, white-walled blocks designed by architects from Mies van der Rohe to Le Corbusier to propose a new way of living in the green of the suburbs.

Bauhaus: an evolution

But the dreams never quite materialised. The aesthetic was taken up by the intellectual bourgeoisie while the proletariat remained suspicious. Most of the Bauhaus architects ended up working on middle-class villas in the suburban hills. Wander around the leafy suburbs of Budapest or Berlin, Brno or Bucharest, and you will find exquisite white-walled villas, often crumbling a little, the legacy of the fashion of Bauhaus style. The familiar elements coalesced into that very recognisable style. There were big picture windows and narrow strip windows. There was an attempt to break down the divisions between internal and external space, with terraces and balconies being treated as sun rooms. There were fluid interiors, rejecting compartmentalisation in favour of open plans. These were blocky white structures but also ones often augmented by curved corners or semi-circular balconies or towers - all based on the platonic geometries beloved of the Bauhaus founder, the back-to-basics set of building blocks.

There were oceanliner handrails (because what could be more functional than a ship?) and there were stripped-down fittings - from door handles to lights, often resembling industrial engineering more than domestic design. There were dramatic stairs in cylindrical towers or with open treads, or industrial steel spirals. The mouldings of traditional houses were banished along with fireplaces and sculptural plasterwork. Heavy furniture was disbanded in favour of tubular steel and glass, items which were almost transparent, that cast no dark shadows. Kitchens were built in and small, functional spaces which celebrated efficiency rather than conviviality. And there were no cellars or attics, only flat roofs - none of the dark repositories of memory or nostalgia.

The extent to which we can itemise these elements and archetypes is a little ironic, of course. Gropius and Mies were attempting to escape style, to drive at an objective, functional architecture, which was irrefutable in its practicality. Yet style it became.

Tom Wolfe, in his scathing book ‘From Bauhaus to Our House’ (1981), reflected on the appropriation of a worker-housing aesthetic applied to everything from schools to corporate offices. After the Second World War you might argue that it was Bauhaus architecture that inspired the explosion in social housing blocks set in green spaces which proliferated across the edges of cities around the world.

What does Bauhaus mean today?

Now the word ‘Bauhaus’ has become ubiquitous and a little meaningless as a consequence. László Tóth, the fictional protagonist of 2024 film ‘The Brutalist’ was, of course, trained at the Bauhaus. It is a code so that we understand he was there at the source of modernism. Hungarians were indeed prominent there; there was Marcel Breuer and there was Farkas Molnár, who designed the first ever Bauhaus residence, the Red House of 1923, which was never built. And most of all, there was László Moholy-Nagy who ran the famous foundation course and set the tone, even if he wasn’t himself an architect.

Bauhaus (literally ‘house of building’) is just too good a word. There was a band named after it and a German DIY store. It is universally applied to apartment blocks in Tel Aviv, few of whose designers had anything to do with the Bauhaus, although they may have come from the same central European backgrounds. It is universally applied across Europe to refer to inter-war modernism of a certain type, just as Brutalism became the go-to description for anything post-war, concrete and sculptural.

The Bauhaus itself lasted only till 1933, when the Nazis made it impossible to continue. By then, its director was Mies van der Rohe, who would later emigrate to the US and take his (rather more luxuriously minimal) version of the Bauhaus to Chicago, where it arguably had an even greater impact, not on worker housing but on corporate America.

Today, the idea of the Bauhaus has a tinge of asceticism, of a kind of functional puritanism. Yet a look at the photos of the school in everyday action reveals a world of parties and balls, of goofy photos and radical theatre. The school appears to be full of women, as it indeed was, and they look like they are enjoying themselves. Their efforts are now being reassessed with figures like Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt and Eva Zeisel being finally given their due, albeit outside architecture. It might be worth remembering that, as well as a legacy of austere houses and apartment blocks that look like factories, the Bauhaus was probably, against all expectations and reputations, also a lot of fun.

Examples of Bauhaus architecture

The Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, by Walter Gropius

Masters’ Houses, Dessau, Germany, by Walter Gropius

Barcelona Pavilion, Spain, by Mies van der Rohe

Doldertal Apartment Building, Zurich, Switzerland, by Marcel Breuer

ADGB Trade Union School, Bern, Berlin, by Hannes Meyer

Dalnoki-Kovats villa, Budapest, Hungary, by Farkas Molnar

2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus School’s move from Weimar to its iconic home in Dessau, Germany, designed by Walter Gropius. To mark the occasion, a programme of exhibitions, conferences and festivals organised by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will take place in the city of Dessau from September 2025 to March 2026.

For more information visit bauhaus-dessau.de

Within the visual legacy of Bauhaus, few are as centrally positioned as Lucia Moholy and yet none more overlooked. While the Czech photographer’s painstakingly composed black and white images of the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau have become globally synonymous with the school, recognition of Moholy’s work, both around Bauhaus and beyond, has been routinely obscured.

‘Lucia Moholy: Exposures’, the first major retrospective of the photographer, aims to change that. Opening at Kunsthalle Prague, in the city of Moholy’s birth, the exhibition casts a suitably wide net in capturing her life’s work. Spanning the 1910s to the 1970s and drawing together more than 600 artefacts, this monumental undertaking offers a long overdue appraisal of a true virtuoso of 20th-century photography.

‘Lucia Moholy: Exposures’

At its heart, ‘Exposures’ reveals the sheer breadth of Moholy’s practice beyond her five years at the Bauhaus and, indeed, beyond the medium of photography. In part, her limited recognition can be attributed to this multidisciplinarity. Moholy worked across art and science, as a photographer, portraitist, writer, editor and information scientist, producing microfilm projects funded by the British government during the Second World War and carrying out others abroad, across Europe and the Middle East, on behalf of Unesco.

Linking the visual with the written word, her urge to preserve cultural heritage could be attributed to the loss of her own Bauhaus negatives after fleeing Germany in 1933 (only to discover that many had been taken and used without her consent), as much as it could to her experience working across multiple cultural contexts. Taking her from Austro-Hungarian Prague to pre-war Yugoslavia, interwar Germany and England, Turkey in the 1950s, before settling in Zurich in 1959, Moholy’s nomadic life drove a similar intrepid spirit in her artistic output.

Because as much as photography reflected culture, it also represented a culture for Moholy, who relentlessly pushed its development. Together with her husband, the Hungarian painter, photographer and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy (whom she married in 1921 and divorced eight years later), the pair expanded experimental forms of cameraless photography, coining the term ‘photogram’ to refer to a photograph made by placing an object or its shadow directly onto photographic paper and printing the resulting image.

Moholy’s photographs embody this wealth of information and innovation but they also contain great beauty. In her portraiture – a particular delight of the exhibition – Moholy’s eye for lighting and perspective frames each sitter with a directness and clarity that echoes the language of her Dessau photographs. Like the women whom she mostly photographed, from Marxist activist Clara Zetkin to German artist Anni Albers, the beauty in Moholy’s work was too often hindered by male peers throughout her lifetime. This exhibition reveals it in full for the first time.

‘Lucia Moholy: Exposures’ is showing at Kunsthalle Prague until 28 October kunsthallepraha.org

Anni Albers, heralded as the most influential textile artist of the 20th century, is being celebrated in a comprehensive exhibit at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. ‘Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper' (until 30 June 2024), which marks a significant exploration of Albers' career, showcases her pivotal shift from weaving to printmaking. Curated by Fritz Horstman, education director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the exhibit is comprised of more than 100 items, ranging from wall hangings and drawings to woven rugs and posthumous commercial collaborations, offering a rich overview of both her talent and continued commitment to innovation. 

Anni Albers at the Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas

Albers' work, characterized by a seamless blend of artistic risk-taking and pragmatic application, is a testament to her belief in the symbiosis of functionality, form, and artistry - a principle deeply rooted in the Bauhaus tradition. The Blanton exhibit is among the first US showcases of her work since its preview at the New Britain Museum of American Art in 2020, providing a rare opportunity to appreciate the breadth of her multi-decade career. 

Blanton curator Claire Howard and Horstman are particularly looking forward to the community's feedback. ‘Our collection of American modern art is really strong, and it’s exciting for us to showcase modernism at large with such a fascinating figure,’ she says. ‘Textiles and contemporary art are receiving a lot of attention right now.’ For many, Albers is a touchstone, an important frontrunner in both the weaving and printmaking communities, as well as a trailblazer whose influence effortlessly transcends the boundaries of her medium.

The exhibition layout is thoughtfully designed to guide visitors through her creative process, emphasising narrative, sight lines, and chronology. Her first works, captured from painstaking combinations of patterns ‘combine to create something more than the sum of their parts’, Horstman comments. Albers' fascination with motifs, particularly the repeated use of triangular patterns from the 1950s through the 1980s, is a focal point of the exhibition and visitors can trace the evolution across different media and eras.

By age 70, Albers ventured into printmaking, finding new ways to express the geometric and sinuous patterns that captivated her. Her travels to ancient Mexican temples played a significant role in this phase, imbuing her work with motifs that bridged her weaving past and printmaking future. Among the standout pieces are her eight-harness Structo Artcraft loom, first purchased in 1950, as well as the ‘Orchestra’ tapestries, commissioned by architect Philip Johnson in 1983 for AT&T's headquarters. These works, resonant with her late 1970s designs, underscore Albers' adaptability and lasting influence across different artistic contexts.

‘Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper’ is more than an exhibition; it's a profound tribute to her spirit. Through every piece displayed, Albers' legacy invites us to decipher the intricacies of her craft, celebrating her unparalleled contribution to the art and design world as we know it today.

‘Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper’ at the Blanton Museum until 30 June 2024

Blanton Museum of Art
200 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd
Austin, TX 78712

blantonmuseum.org

Set along Aspen, Colorado’s central Paepcke Park, Mollie is a new 68-room hotel with stylistic nods to the Bauhaus, the German architecture and design school that helped spawn modernism. One of its most prominent students, Austrian American architect Herbert Bayer, was instrumental in shaping the look and feel of the popular ski resort town.

Mollie hotel is perched on Aspen’s Paepcke Park

Polymath Bayer – perhaps most famous for developing the eponymous geometric san serif typeface – was behind the design of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the renovation of Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House, and numerous local arts and culture buildings. His implementation of rational functionalism is evident throughout the city.

With a façade evoking Silver Boom-era lot lines but also the simplicity of rectilinear massing so critical to the Bauhaus principle, Mollie stands out amongst nearby Victorian homes, yet its proportioning is conducive to its context. Large exposures help frame the surrounding natural beauty, while reflecting the scale of these historical, 19th-century structures’ fenestration. Award-winning local firm CCY Architects was responsible for this thoughtful, site-responsive approach.

Much of the chosen building material reflects this explicit yet nuanced treatment. A dark red and purple structural base suggests the natural oxidation of stone in the nearby Elk Mountains, but also the components prevalent throughout Aspen’s downtown. The exterior is clad in fast-growing, sustainably harvested radiata pine and applied in a slightly non-uniform fashion to emulate the area’s dense forests.

‘Mollie Aspen is an homage to the city’s reputation as a place of art, culture, and adventure,’ says Ruben Caldwell, partner at Post Company, the firm charged with the hotel’s interior design. ‘We took inspiration from the town’s storied mining history, natural landscape, and Bauhaus presence, which reflects its tradition of being firmly grounded while gazing abroad.’

Through the various public spaces – an open-plan lobby and living room-esque bar – and guest rooms, the reduction of superfluous excess, as espoused by the Bauhaus, is harnessed in the idiosyncratic shapes common in the American West. The latest energy efficiency technologies – such as solar-powered heat pumps – pull this holistic concept together.

Clean lines play off of natural materials, earthenware ceramics, sand-cast solid brass, and pared-back yet hand-woven textiles indicative of Anni Albers, another of the Bauhaus’ influential graduates. Earthtones and soft yet restrained shapes abound throughout. The hotel is a testament to the fact that the ability to achieve formal rigour doesn’t have to come at the cost of the finest artisanal prowess. Industry and craft aren’t always mutually exclusive.

mollieaspen.com

ccyarchitects.com

Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen Architects and Cristian Dominguez Fernandez have revealed a new industrialised building system prototype – the Chilean architecture studio's proposed solution for the country's increasingly urgent need for housing. 'Towards the end of 2019, we found ourselves with a series of commissions with requirements that as architects and builders we had not had before. We were asked to develop projects in very limited times, at low cost and with execution time frames that seemed unattainable,' says practice founder Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen.

Ignacio Rojas Hirigoyen Architects’ industrialised building system prototype

'Times of pandemic, confinement, interrupted distribution chains, scarce materials and rising prices, labour shortages. An unfavourable scenario that made us realise that our systems were not providing solutions to these problems based on the usual ways of working. This crisis is also transferred to the world of construction. How to budget a work? It seems that we have lost certainties. How to solve it? What kind of solution do we offer from architecture and design? We are confronted with a turning point in our discipline. In the midst of a complex situation, we chose to take a resilient stance,' he continues. 

Inspired by modernist architecture and the Bauhaus, led by lessons learned through 20th century pre-fab solutions and contemporary housing needs, the architects crafted a dwelling model that offers a take on building fast and efficiently, while maintaining quality and a design-led approach. Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann's Packaged House and Jean Prouve's 6x6 House were key examples the Chilean practice drew on. 

The modular structure comes in ready-made parts that can be swiftly assembled on site, making the most of simple geometries and easy-to-source materials. Timber and steel provide the frame and exterior (the latter specifically wrapped in corrugated metal panels), with interior surfaces made of laminated wood boards. It can all be built with the help of four operators and a simple crane truck, the architects explain. 

'[We want] to provide better conditions for our workforce, the lowest stratum of our society, today largely made up in Chile by immigrants who seek opportunities for themselves and their families in our country. They require access to a better quality of life and new tools compared to those currently offered by the building industry in Chile and in the world,' writes Rojas Hirigoyen, who flags the critical role of inclusivity in the progression of our society – and how architecture can prove a defining and necessary force in tackling the task in hand. 

ignaciorojashirigoyen.com 

theandeshouse.com

The Women Bauhaus is a new collective of five young female artists who are celebrating and perpetuating the legacy of the women behind the Bauhaus movement. The project has been commissioned by La Prairie as part of its ongoing patronage of the arts (also see its 2021 Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective at MoMA PS1) and will make its debut at Art Basel 2022 this June. 

Under the patronage of Wallpaper* Designer of the Year 2020 Sabine Marcelis, each of the artists has created a work of art that responds to the Bauhaus movement’s 'pursuit of harmony’ in design. 

The artists 

The artists behind The Women Bauhaus are Jasmine Deporta, a recent graduate of ECAL (the college previously collaborated on the La Prairie x ECAL design project); Kristin Chan of Hong Kong Design Institute; Lauren Januhowski of École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs; Talia Golchin of Central Saint Martins; and Gloria Fan Duan from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Each project is distinctly different in its execution but united in its influence by icons such as textile artist Otti Berger, Benita Koch-Otte, and Marianne Brandt – all women Bauhaus artists who, historically, have been relegated to the shadow of their male counterparts. 

For instance, textile artist Lauren Januhowski was inspired by the weaver Gunta Stölzl’s weaving patterns and colours to create a textile paravent using a monotype painting technique. For Out of the Blue, Jasmine Deporta has collaged fragmented images of female bodies together to create a floating, circular sculpture that draws from the Bauhaus in its use of colours and forms. 

Gloria Fan Duan’s work aligns Zen and Bauhaus teachings on harmony for Wishbone, a digital art sculpture in the shape of a knot that symbolises rhythm and universality. Talia Golchin’s work is also a digital sculpture that uses an animation of concentric circles to create an abstract rendering of the female form. Kristin Chan’s work Magnify blends architecture and 3D modelling to create a miniature world that highlights the importance of scale in creating a harmonious spatial sculpture. 

Speaking about The Women Bauhaus, Deporta says, ‘Female collectives are founded on the premise that women can raise each other up in order to reach their potential and circumnavigate insecurities. This collective is a beautiful concept in its equality, solidarity and community.’ 

Golchin echoes the point: ‘From a professional aspect, it is enriching to join forces and work with talented artists with different creative backgrounds. From animation and sculpture to textile and architecture, we have formed a creative power collective. From a personal aspect, I feel that I have been part of an important journey that could potentially influence others.’ 

The product launch 

La Prairie's artistic patronages are always aligned with a new product launch, and this year’s debut is one of its most exciting yet. Skin Caviar Harmony L'Extrait is a new addition to the brand’s iconic Skin Caviar collection. Infused with patented Caviar Infinite, the serum strengthens skin ligaments to prevent facial sagging and smooth deep wrinkles.

INFORMATION

laprairie.com

Architecture is one of those professions that can often become a family affair. Gottfried Böhm is not only the son of an architect, he is also the grandson, the husband and the father of architects. Since the early days of his career, more than 60 years ago, Böhm has been known for his original work, which, in 1986, earned him the Pritzker Prize. The Pilgrimage Church in Neviges, Germany, perfectly characterises his style – and is nothing like any church you could imagine.

Gottfried Böhm's life and career

Born in 1920, the son of acclaimed architect Dominicus Böhm, Gottfried Böhm began his career combining architecture and sculpture at the Technical University Munich and the Academy of Fine Arts. A few years as an assistant architect in the family business were followed by a brief period of work in the US, where he met Mies van der Rohe and Waiter Gropius. He took over the Böhm architecture studio in Koln after his father's death in 1955, kick-starting a long and impressive career, influenced by his father's designs as well as Bauhaus principles. His finished works include more than 40 churches, from Taiwan to Brazil.

The Pilgrimage Church

The Pilgrimage Church project began as a competition-winning entry in 1964, in response to the Catholic archdiocese of Koln's call for a church in Neviges, a small town about half an hour outside the city. Böhm's winning design ticked all the boxes, providing both the space and atmosphere for religious functions – it offers seating for 800 and standing room for 2,200 in a truly spectacular building – without any obvious recourse to traditional religious symbolism. 

The church was completed in May 1968 and instantly became a landmark in the town. Taking advantage of a row of pilgrims' houses and the church's position at the top of a slope, Böhm created a processional way leading up the hill, into the church's open courtyard and inside, ending at the altar and the pilgrimage's religious climax.

The building's voluminous composition – a constellation of protruding angular polygons with a roof of folded concrete plates – reflects Böhm's experience as a sculptor (he works in clay; sculpting a series of models until reaching the fin a l shape). As irregular as it can be on the outside, the church is equally impressive from within, dominated by strong geometry, an awe-inspiring interior height and spatial complexity around the main hall. The building's plasticity, accentuated by the roughness of materials and the play of light on both the sharp, free-shaped volumes and through the colourful windows, sets it apart fro m the work of Böhm's contemporaries. The church's fragmented volumes elegantly break up its huge bulk and give it a unique form that's hard to imitate – and to categorise.

Modernist principles

Some modernist principles can be identified in the design; Böhm shows Bauhaus ethics – austerity, honesty and an expression of his own time – in his use of materials, the layout and the technology. Still, that doesn't make him a modernist. He rejects labels, although he has been described as both expressionist and post-Bauhaus. He prefers, he says, to be ‘nothing in particular', to shift freely from style to style, from the simple to the complex, experimenting with form and material, utilising steel, glass, brick and concrete to suit each commission.

The Neviges church's revolutionary shape is the antithesis of everything Böhm is against: imitation of historic styles, over-designing and extreme minimalism. His design philosophy veers towards a human yet experimental approach: 'Anyone who does not have the strength to sin will not necessarily be a saint or a good architect – more likely a bore.'

A Pritzker Prize winner

The church is a true icon, very much of its time, and it brought Böhm many more commissions. Today, in his late eighties, he should be content; with the Pritzker Prize and worldwide critical acclaim in his pocket, and having built and taught for more than half a century, he has already left a rich architectural legacy - in more ways than one. Three of his four sons have become architects (the fourth is a painter). But Böhm continues to design nearly every day, either alone or with his sons. And, far from basking in his past glory, he is ever in the present. 'My favourite piece of work,' he reflects, 'is always the one in progress and under construction.'

A version of this article first appeared in issue 189 of Wallpaper* (June/July 2007)

We celebrate the best designs of the past, reissued for the future with modern technologies and sustainable updates. From Flos' rediscovery of a classic in a new chromatic composition, to UniFor’s tribute to Aldo Rossi's perfect office, and Charlotte Perriand’s own desk design, these are the best reissues from leading brands and design masters. 

‘Parigi’ armchair by Aldo Rossi, for UniFor

At the end of the 1980s, Italian architect Aldo Rossi drafted his perfect office. The furniture collection of this ideal space included the ‘Consiglio’ table, ‘Cartesio’ bookcase and ‘Museo’ office chair, as well as the ‘Parigi’ armchair. The last featured a curiously slanted black aluminium frame supporting an apparently rigid bright red seat and backrest: made of polyurethane foam with a red finish, the seat is surprisingly soft. This design – now reissued by UniFor and winning a Wallpaper* Design Award 2022 – perfectly exemplifies Rossi’s desire to think about the office as a domestic space, and to combine a furniture functionality with his architectural background. ‘This is more or less my idea of design: to be able to translate fantastic, personal elements into rational, repeatable pieces, rather than one-of-a-kind creations,’ wrote Rossi. 

unifor.it

‘Petit Bureau en Forme Libre’ by Charlotte Perriand, reissued by Cassina

Part of Charlotte Perriand’s freeform design experiments, Cassina’s ’Petit Bureau en Forme Libre’ was originally designed for her own Montparnasse studio. Perriand’s pioneering design approach is evident in the curved forms of the home office desk, allowing users to approach the piece according to their needs and allowing flexibility of use. An innovative design when it was first conceived in 1952, the desk remains a marvel of furniture design to this day. Made of solid Canaletto Walnut and also available in black, Perriand’s design was discreetly updated with an optional compartment for sockets and cables, combining its modern form with an added functionality, and winning a Wallpaper* Design Award 2022 in the process.

cassina.com

‘265 Chromatica’ by Paolo Rizzatto, for Flos

Designed by Paolo Rizzatto for Flos in 1973, the ‘265’ was the Italian architect’s first foray into lighting design. Though produced in black and white, the lamp was based on colour-coded original drawings – blue for the moving arm, yellow for the counterweight and red for the half-spherical lampshade. ‘Light is what allows our eyes to distinguish colour, so using colour to define the design of a light seemed like a natural progression of the concept,’ says Rizzatto. When presenting ‘265’, Rizzatto used colour to easily explain the lamp’s mechanics: ‘I am an architect, my first approach to light was based on its function within architecture,’ he explains. Set in Rizzatto’s primary colours, the new ‘265 Chromatica’ celebrates the architect’s thinking, and wins a Wallpaper* Design Award 2022. 

flos.com

More reissues from our archives‘

‘Butaque’ chair by Clara Porset

Celebrating the Mexican vernacular, Luteca has reissued the work of Cuban-born designer Clara Porset. Living and working in Mexico since the 1930s, Porset worked closely with Luis Barragán and created some of the most iconic Mexican furniture of the 20th century. ‘Clara Porset persists in the search for her own design, a design that reflects the cultural and social conditions of Mexico with the intention of turning it into a national design,’ said Mexican curator Ana Elena Mallet. Her best known piece was her reinterpretation of the classic Latin American ‘Butaque’ (which she designed in the 1940s), a traditional chair merging Spanish colonial forms and pre-Colombian ritualistic seats. Luteca collaborated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico to recreate Porset’s original design.

luteca.com

‘Pavilion’ and ‘Exposior’ collections by Paul McCobb

CB2 has acquired some pieces by American designer Paul McCobb, with collections of indoor and outdoor furniture as well as lighting now available through the American furniture company. McCobb’s 1952 ‘Pavilion’ collection of outdoor chairs and tables features delicate iron frames, class elements and upholstered seats (in Sunbrella fabrics), while the ‘Exposior’ lighting range, designed in 1951, is defined by timeless compositions and details in brass, wood and travertine. FORM Portfolios, the company preserving Paul McCobb’s legacy, worked closely on the collection. Managing director Mark Masiello described the partnership as ‘an authentic extension of Paul McCobb's vision, also honouring his legacy by creating a collection that is attainable for those who appreciate and seek good design’.

cb2.com

‘Camaleonda’ sofa by Mario Bellini

It may be 50 years since Mario Bellini designed the ‘Camaleonda’, yet this modular sofa looks utterly contemporary, and now B&B Italia is reissuing it with a sustainable spin. Keeping the aesthetic of the 1970 original, the company redeveloped the sofa from the inside. Made of FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified beech wood and recyclable materials, the inner structure is easy to take apart at the end of the sofa’s life, while the feet are made of recycled wood. Ever reconfigurable, the sofa is, of all Bellini’s pieces, ‘perhaps the one that better represents a sense of freedom’, he says.

bebitalia.com

Tables by Marcel Breuer

Very Good & Proper and Isokon Plus have reissued two tables by Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer. The paths of the two companies merged last year when VG&P founder Ed Carpenter acquired the iconic brand whose archive includes designs by Marcel Breuer, Ernest Race and Barber Osgerby. ‘We shared the same ethos,’ observes Carpenter, who has since been working closely with Isokon Plus director Mark Smith and his team. The two companies’ values align neatly: both believe in creating sustainable furniture, create high-quality, long-lasting products and support an ethical use of materials. ‘One of the great things about joining forces with Mark and Isokon were the archives,’ says Carpenter. Earlier this year, Carpenter and Smith came across some blueprints for a pair of pedestal tables, originally designed by Marcel Breuer in 1937. One was made at the Bauhaus, the other was never produced. The duo devised a way to bring the designs back to life using a more energy efficient and environmentally conscious process but still keeping the original features intact. The tables’ designs were largely experimental, but their new editions leverage the same technologies as nine decades ago, when they were initially conceived. ‘There is an intrinsic value to the modernist community,’ says Smith. ‘An honesty to the materials that we both love.’

isokonplus.com

‘Duc-Duc’ sofa by Mario Bellini

Mario Bellini first designed the ‘Duc’ sofa in 1976, a piece that reflected the free design spirit that was emerging at the time. That same year, Bellini drafted a modular furniture range called ‘The Book of Furniture’ for Cassina, an investigation into the language of living and its archetypes. Bellini had worked closely with the Italian design brand’s R&D department on experiments that resulted in the sofa’s first iteration, leveraging sophisticated technologies and materials to achieve its simple form. The new ‘Duc-Duc’ remains faithful to Bellini’s original design, with updated measurements and details redeveloped for added comfort. The project was led by Cassina LAB, a new research arm of the company, in collaboration with Poli.Design at Milan’s Politecnico. The result features a rigid panelled frame encased in polyurethane foam and wrapped in a 100 per cent recycled fibre made of PET recovered from the sea.

cassina.com

‘Menhir’ tables by Giotto Stoppino

Since 1870, Italian furniture company Acerbis has played a pioneering role in the development of the Italian furniture industry. has played a quietly pivotal role in Italian design, collaborating with a number of high-profile artists and designers. It was one of the first Italian companies to work with Japanese designers, adding metallic inserts and new materials to the wood of northern Italy’s Val Seriana. Acerbis was recently relaunched following acquisition by the MDF Italia group, and with a new creative direction by industrial designer Francesco Meda and Milan-based Spanish architect David Lopez Quincoces. The pair have been operating a quiet revolution of the company, bringing back to life iconic midcentury designs by the likes of Nanda Vigo, Gianfranco Frattini and Giotto Stoppino whose ‘Menhir’ tables (pictured above) were created together with company founder Lodovico Acerbis and feature a totemic composition of colourful marble modules. 

acerbisdesign.com

‘Arkade’ chair by Nanna Ditzel

Danish furniture brand Brdr Krüger revisited a previously chair design by Nanna Ditzel. The ‘Arkade’ chair was originally designed in 1983 during a decade-long collaboration between the company and the late Danish designer. Ditzel's commitment to traditional craftsmanship, new materials and novel techniques made her a perfect match with the furniture brand, originally founded as a woodturning workshop in 1886 and devoted to reinterpreting midcentury Danish design for a contemporary audience. Ditzel’s fondness for soft shapes and circular forms are expressed through her signature postmodern, elegant geometries in works like her ‘Hanging Egg’ chair design, and the combination of materials and techniques in the ‘Arkade’ chair (woodturning, steam-bent wood, metal and upholstery) articulate the designer’s love for decoration and colour. The chair is available in Kvadrat’s ‘Hallingdal’ fabric, originally designed by Ditzel in 1965, but the material can be modified with different finishes to allow for customisation.

brdr-kruger.com

‘Kyoto’ table by Gianfranco Frattini

Gianfranco Frattini was a key figure in the development of modern Italian design who believed in the postwar reconstruction of the country, moving seamlessly between scales, from jewellery to buildings. Active during a pivotal shift in Italian furniture manufacturing, from the painstakingly handmade to the factory-made, he collaborated with the industrial entrepreneurs of the time. But it is his relationship with craftsman Pierluigi Ghianda that resulted in some of the most memorable designs of his career, such as the ‘Kyoto’ table, which has now been given a new lease of life by Poltrona Frau. The table was first produced in 1974, following a trip to Japan and the discovery of century-old techniques that, Frattini and Ghianda observed, were very similar to the ones used in Northern Italy. ‘It was made of structural joints that adapt to the material: a pure expression of rationalism at the highest level’, says Frattini’s daughter, architect Emanuela Frattini Magnusson. The table has an interlocking structure with a grid surface composed of 1,681 squares. Wooden elements dovetail into each other to create a self-supporting composition, while the legs slot into the table top, and are moveable to change the table’s configuration. Along the edge of the table, smaller, darker-wooden inserts create what could look like a decorative motif, but, Frattini Magnusson says, they are a functional trick, placed to strengthen the sides. ‘There is no decoration; the structure becomes the object’.

poltronafrau.com

‘Prunier’ tableware by Le Corbusier

Cassina and Ginori 1735 have joined forces to present the ‘Prunier’, a dinner service by Le Corbusier. The ultimate modernist table setting, it was originally created for London's Prunier restaurant in 1961, and inspired by a tapestry created by the architect ten years prior. As the legend goes, Le Corbusier himself used these plates, which in his view successfully merged quality and taste – ‘the taste of shape’. The stylised motifs have been hand-applied on shiny enamelled white porcelain, faithfully recreating the architect’s original pieces. 

cassina.com; ginori1735.com

‘Diabolo’ by Achille Castiglioni

Achille Castiglioni’s last lighting design for Flos is back. Working closely with the Fondazione Achille Castiglioni, the Italian lighting brand has been recreating some of the Italian designer's most iconic lights and now the ‘Diabolo’ lamp makes a comeback for the first time after a decade. Originally designed by Castiglioni for Flos in 1998, the totemic double cone design will now be reissued in three sophisticated new shades; white, beaver brown and cherry red. The height-adjustable pendant lamp takes its name from a traditional Chinese toy, whose shapes it discreetly references through Castiglioni's minimal design touch.

flos.com

The act of creation is messy and chaotic, and the conflicting demands and desires of designers, manufacturers, retailers and consumers makes a mockery of good intentions. The Bauhaus School continues to lurk in the unconscious of the contemporary designer. The ideals and ethos of the Bauhaus, not to mention the huge influence wielded by the school’s teachers and alumni, continue to be held up as a high-water mark for good design in all its forms. So it stands to reason that if you can draw a direct line between a contemporary product and the extensive catalogue of Bauhaus-era designs, you can lay claim to one of the school’s immutable core beliefs: that all ‘good design’ has innately pure and progressive motives.

American arts writer Nicholas Fox Weber’s new book is an attempt to draw this line for one of the most ubiquitous symbols of modern design, the Apple iPhone. Weber is well versed in Bauhaus lore, having helmed the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for four decades, getting to know the emigre couple and their circle while never ceasing to marvel at their asceticism and general all-round wisdom. The line he creates arrives indecently quickly at the iPhone, largely by way of tracing Steve Jobs’ enthusiasm for Bauhaus-style design, purist typography and the evident influence of Dieter Rams on the company’s output during its most ‘high design’ era under Jonathan Ive.

This is a book for those who like anecdotes and connections, behind the scenes insights and potted biographies of key players. For example, it offers an insightful summary of the Bauhaus diaspora, and how the Albers and their peers ended up so revered and influential within the burgeoning post-war art and design scene. There’s no denying that Weber’s suggested connection exist in some form – there’s practically no aspect of global design education that wasn’t influenced by the German school, whether it’s the mythos of creativity or the practical structure of courses and internships. However, it is a tall order trying to conflate consumer technology with the high-minded world of fine art.

By the end of the book, the dots are duly connected, but the result is more six degrees of separation than a solid, unbroken line. Perhaps unwittingly, Weber ends up perpetuating the age-old narrative of (most male, mostly white) genius, benevolently bestowing their vision on huddled masses that know no better. That the iPhone and its billions of imitators are remarkable is without question. That they are somehow innately ‘good’, let alone ‘sublime,’ is almost entirely subjective. Finding an equivalence between the Homage to the Square series and the glassy perfection of a freshly unboxed iPhone 11 is one thing, but it conveniently sidesteps the myriad ways in which a smartphone is so much, much more than a triumph of art, design and engineering, for better and for worse.

Weber saves his most withering barbs for Tom Wolfe’s vengeful dismissal of the Bauhaus’s lofty and elitist idealism, as well as the dark arts of branding and the endlessly mutating world of social media. These things don’t seem to fit the purist narrative that places the designer – and the artist – on a pedestal high above the rest of us. When crude reality intervenes, it does not always go well. For example, Ive’s subsequent departure from Apple to set up LoveFrom is given short shrift. ‘What is certain is that this [firm] is a long way from the restraint and dignity of Bauhaus,’ Weber writes with palpable disdain at this perceived triumph of commerce over culture.

Ultimately, who knows what the Albers would have made of the iPhone (Josef died in 1976, Anni in 1994)? Weber’s first-hand knowledge of the couple paints them as charming, monastic, opinionated and relatively technophobic. When, in 1936, Josef designed the catalogue cover for the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art exhibition (curated by Philip Johnson), the hero image was a giant industrial ball bearing, bereft of any function or context. The Albers would undoubtedly have admired the iPhone’s glassy perfection, but one suspects they wouldn’t even have attempted to turn it on, let alone actually use it. 

INFORMATION

The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design, Nicholas Fox Weber, $28, Penguin.

penguinrandomhouse.com

Isokon Plus is a company so rich in history that it’s a struggle to sum it up in a few short paragraphs. It was founded in London in 1931 as the Isokon Furniture Company by entrepreneur Jack Pritchard, who, seduced by the workings of the Bauhaus, wanted to bring a taste of European modernism back to Britain.

His ambitious plans to build homes, as well as the furniture within them, began with the Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, north London (now known as the Isokon Building). At the time of its completion in 1934, it was the first modernist block to be built in the UK.

Pritchard’s ideology attracted Bauhaus pioneers Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Swiss architect Egon Riss and midcentury heavyweight Ernest Race, who each worked with the company to create pieces using Pritchard’s favourite material, plywood. In the 1980s, Chris McCourt took the helm and brought with him a new wave of designers, including Barber & Osgerby.

The pair would create a number of pieces for the brand, including the ‘Loop’ coffee table that launched their careers, and the ‘Shell’ chair, which was reissued this autumn. Designed in 2004, the birch plywood chair complements Barber & Osgerby’s 2000 ‘Shell’ table (itself an homage to Breuer’s Isokon dining table).

The design stands out for its pure form, achieved by moulded contours and an absence of mechanical fixings. Meanwhile, the paper-thin yet sturdy construction, which evokes the white cards used for architectural model making, is testament to the brand’s expert engineering. Visually stunning and ergonomic to boot, this piece, like many others in the Isokon family, is sure to stand the test of time. §

A version of this article originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*248)

INFORMATION

isokonplus.com

‘It is not the person ignorant of writing, but the one ignorant of photography, who will be the illiterate of the future,’ states modernist polymath László Moholy-Nagy – as performed by Hans-Ulrich Obrist – in the documentary film The New Bauhaus, directed by Alysa Nahmias. The film, which honours the movement’s centenary with a close look at the seminal legacy and practice of the Bauhaus master, premiered globally at the Architecture & Design Film Festival on Wednesday night.

The New Bauhaus follows the journey of Moholy-Nagy, who founded the New Bauhaus school in Chicago in 1937, and theorised about a camera’s possibilities, terming his view of making art ‘Neues Sehen’ (New Vision). It was this vision that played an influential role in America’s embrace of modern design, and is still relevant today – ringing true in his prophetic statement above.

Fast forward to 2009, when Kyle Bergman founded the Architecture & Design Film Festival. The 21st century has seen an inseparable bond forming between architecture and the lens – sealed firmer still through popular culture (and social media) thanks to the discipline’s often imposing visual impact. To Bergman, the big screen seemed the most fitting medium to transfer this multitude of messages to a multitude of architecture enthusiasts. Now in its 11th season, festivalgoers of ADFF New York have a packed programme to look forward to.

Focusing on individual architects’ lives as well as wider political and socio-economic issues, ADFF touches upon a sizeable range of subjects in the following days. Some are related to architecture’s role in tackling housing injustice (PUSH, by Fredrik Gertten), while some trace the immigration story of lauded and fledgling architecture professionals: the Swiss structural engineer Othmar H. Ammann in Gateways to New York by Martin Witz, and A Poetics of Living by Caroline Alder and co-directed with Damien Faure, respectively.

In Mario Botta: The Space Beyond, director Loretta Dalpozzo and Michèle Volontè travel along with the energetic Swiss architect as he continues to work on various projects at the age of 76. City Dreamers by Joseph Hillel, premiering on ADFF’s closing night, sheds light on the careers and impact of four trailblazing architects – Phyllis Lambert, Blanch Lemco van Ginkel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and Denise Scott Brown – who all too often found themselves to be the only women in the room.

As well as films, expect i



ntimate post-film discussions with the films’ subjects, directors and architects who inspired them. Beyond the movie screen you’ll also find tours and walks across New York City on the festival’s programme, offering a uniquely cinematic insight into architecture and design. Take your camera along too – you better follow Moholy-Nagy’s advice.

A taster of The New Bauhaus – featuring quotes by László Moholy-Nagy set to atmospheric music and cinematic shots

INFORMATION

ADFF runs from 16 –20 October, at Cinépolis Chelsea

adfilmfest.com

In a year rich in Bauhaus inspired offerings, as institutions across the globe celebrate 100 years from the foundation of the famous German school, it might be hard to catch the public's attention. Yet the latest show at London's RIBA headquarters, ‘Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism In Britain 1933-66', succeeds in stealing the spotlight with a show that explores what Bauhaus' principles meant for Britain. 

Featuring rare treats and information on lesser-known projects of the era, such as drawings produced during a short-lived partnership between Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry, the exhibition focuses on the British legacy of three Bauhaus émigrés – Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Maszlo Moholy-Nagy. Using the few years (1934-37), when all three were in Britain, as a springboard, ‘Beyond Bauhaus' delves into drawings, photography, film and illustration to uncover how the movement inspired and influenced, and eventually changed British architecture.

‘It is a survey of what was happening in British architecture at the time’, explains RIBA curator of exhibitions Pete Collard. It is about these modernist ideas that travelled from Europe ‘and how they gestate and developed here.’ 

Chilean architecture firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen's ingenious exhibition design is crucial to that. Taking what effectively is a show of archival material – mostly two-dimensional prints of photography and drawings – and giving it a third dimension is one mean feat, but the studio's clever set up of coloured pillars and cut out peep-holes does the trick, attracting the eye and helping you move through the show.

 

In terms of content, the exhibition is divided – quite discreetly – into three parts. The first section ‘doesn’t contain built projects', says Collard. ‘It is more about the excitement about this new movement,’ and takes the visitor through theoretical schemes and visionary but unbuilt work, following the teachings and networks of those three Bauhaus tutors. 

In the second part of the exhibition however, this changes. 'Chapter two is all about the house,’ explains RIBA curator of photographs Valeria Carullo. The journey here guides us through buildings in the domestic scale, but also looks at interiors and furniture. Maxwell Fry's Sun House and Connell, Ward and Lucas' High and Over House are among the offerings.

Finally, chapter three expands and zooms out to look at the larger scale, including projects such as multi-family housing, healthcare and education, focusing on the point when pioneering modernist ideas went beyond private houses and involved the public sector and more sociologically-minded work. ‘This section is much about the legacy of those ideas and opportunities that hadn’t had the chance to be put into action as yet,’ says Collard.

A four-month programme of events has been curated to accompany the show, spanning film screenings, talks and workshops.

INFORMATION

‘Beyond Bauhaus’ is on view at the Architecture Gallery, RIBA, until 1 February 2020

architecture.com

ADDRESS

RIBA
66 Portland Place
W1B 1AD
London

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

The new Bauhaus museum in Dessau, Germany opened on Sunday and finally offers the city's Bauhaus Foundation a dedicated space to show its substantial collection of objects, models and schoolwork projects. As the second largest of its kind in the world, Dessau's Bauhaus collection requires the sort of climate-controlled museum conditions that the famous but listed school building by Gropius just outside the city centre could not achieve without significant transformation.

The new museum was conceived ‘as a black box with a glass envelope’ or a ‘winter jacket made of glass’ – as project architect Roberto Gonzalez of Barcelona-based practice addenda architects puts it. The simple but effective design stemmed from a brief that required the creation of a space that could host events and temporary exhibitions, as well as a large gallery shows where light-sensitive precious and original documents and pieces could be displayed.

From outside, the building’s glass skin reacts with the city on the eastern side and to the greenery of a park on the west. It reflects light back or allows glimpses through the building depending on the time of day and the amount of sunlight, explains Gonzalez.

Though it is not as transparent as some might have hoped – in part due to budgetary constraints that meant mechanical heating and cooling were largely eschewed on the ground floor and the glass curtain had to do more work than initially intended – when daylight begins to recede, the effect is pronounced and delightful. ‘That’s when you can see right through the museum and follow all its activities,’ says Gonzalez.

Inside, the project shines and innovates. The main entrance hall feels light, airy and spacious whatever the season or time of day, and offers plenty of room for events, meetings and exhibitions. There is also not a column in sight as the black box stands, or hovers, on two stairwell shafts that are 50m apart.

Constructed like a bridge, the two ends are bent slightly upwards and will only settle to form a horizontal line over time through the weight of visitors and exhibits. Choosing a black box for the main gallery was an audacious and unexpected move that takes a little period of adjustment, but that ultimately focuses the mind on the pieces and, in many ways, is highly apt given the Bauhaus movement’s interest in theatre, spectacle and dance.

László Moholy-Nagy’s brilliant kinetic Light-Space-Modulator (of which one, of the few existing official replicas, is on display) looks very much at home in this setting.

The museum’s location is also significant and wasn’t without controversy. Instead of being located on or near the existing Bauhaus site north-west of the centre, a site on the edge of an existing park in the city centre was eventually chosen. ‘The idea was to avoid a museum island scenario but to create a new Bauhaus location in the city,’ explains the director and CEO of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Claudia Perren.

‘The city is already separated from the Bauhaus school and masters' houses by train tracks and misses out on a lot of tourism as a result,’ adds Gonzalez. It makes sense to bring some new energy – and some of the movement that was so seminal for Dessau – into the city centre.

INFORMATION

addendaarchitects.com

bauhaus-dessau.de

ADDRESS

Bauhaus Museum Dessau
06844 Dessau-Roßlau
Germany

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Simplicity is a keyword for COS’ Christophe Copin and Nicole Bischofer. The designers rely on clean, essential lines, almost minimal in their purity, but there is nothing basic in their rather conceptual approach. Having an appreciation for craft and the sophistication that goes into the minute details they favour, their style is tinged with an almost architectural attitude.

In fact, Copin, who directs the brand’s menswear line, and his co-designer for womenswear Bischofer, have worked on a Bauhaus-related re-edition of archive pieces, marking the school’s 100-year anniversary. ‘We don’t have this kind of history behind us, but twelve years is already something’, Copin acknowledges and adds: ‘When we changed the fit a little bit, and edited fabrics, we realised: the pieces are still relevant’.

The design principles of the Bauhaus have been at the forefront of every COS collection from the beginning. The capsule of 12 remastered archive pieces, which is set to be available in early November at select COS stores and online, picks a unique aspect. ‘We really wanted to work around form and function this time,’ says Copin. ‘You need a coat to protect you from the cold, but maybe you don’t need all its additional detail.’ Stripping things away, Copin and Bischofer arrived at a very pure silhouette and then played on defining fabrics and details.

Accordingly, they propose a stone grey felted wool coat for men, eschewing the lapel, and a white poplin shirt with just the outlines of a plastron. ‘We were focusing on the art of closure’, Copin explains. ‘You won’t find any decoration to distract from the functionality’. Monochrome shades of crisp whites and toned-down greys, reminiscent of the first Bauhaus school buildings in Dessau, are studiously austere and, as often as not, neutral too.

A notable effect of the Bauhaus influence on the looks: geometric shapes. To give them a compelling twist, Copin and Bischofer used the brand’s technical expertise. They fine-tuned silhouettes so that they appear noticeably constructed without appearing heavy or stiff. Case in point, an asymmetrical wool dress with an elongated strap that falls down the back is undeniably graphic in its form, but suggests an alluring accessibility.

Copin refers to their approach with the words of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school: ‘Design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society'. It’s something that is valid more than ever before

INFORMATION

cosstores.com

In a year of seemingly never-ending Bauhaus-related events marking the school’s 100-year- anniversary, ‘Original Bauhaus’, a new exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin manages not only to hold its own but stand out for its refreshing approach.

Instead of being organised chronologically or historically, it revolves around 14 case studies (one for each year of the movement’s short existence in Germany between 1919 and 1933) and explores them through heretofore unseen materials, both originals and reproductions, as well as new artworks by the likes of Thomas Ruff and Thomas Demand.

‘Reproductions, re-issues and remakes have made the Bauhaus the 20th century’s most influential school of architecture, design and art,’ explains exhibition curator Nina Wiedemeyer. By combining all of these together, the exhibition cleverly begs the question: what is an original?

Accordingly, one of the case studies is Marianne Braun’s geometric tea infuser, a piece created as a prototype and intended for mass production but that ultimately always remained a one-off and was only ever made by hand. Seven of the (eight existing) original teapots are displayed together for the first time and it’s intriguing to see the small differences in each one.

Another looks at László Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 text Production – Reproduction and his experimentation, together with Lucia Moholy, with camera-less photography and projecting images directly on to photo paper. Moholy wasn’t interested in the original but rather the the reproduction of the original created through repro-photography, or what he called ‘photograms’.

Perhaps most striking is the section devoted to the famous Bauhaus Stairway painting by Oskar Schlemmer, which depicts several women standing in artful positions on the staircase of the Bauhaus school in Dessau. Here we see what looks like the original but is in fact an almost identical copy painted by Carl Schlemmer (Oskar’s brother) in 1958 some 26 years after the original was painted and 15 years Oskar’s death. Wiedemeyer explains that because the original had become a part of MoMA’s permanent collection in the 1940s, the family presumably missed having the painting and so asked Carl to paint another one. ‘If you looked at it and didn’t know it was a copy you would say you were looking at the real thing.’

Another beguiling element of the show is the focus on the Bauhaus’ rightly admired ‘preliminary course’. So many Bauhaus exhibitions focus on the furniture and the objects, the big hero figures and names, but here we get to see the more anonymous results of the exercises carried out by the students as part of the famous six-month course.

On view are the results of the ‘colour circle’ exercise carried out under Wassily Kandinsky, or the outcome of the ‘material study’ exercise set by Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy, where students explored textures and material by drawing them and assembling them into sculptures and collages.

One wall in the space lists the exercises that made up the course and they include poetic tasks such as ‘ice-skating on paper’ and ‘emotion shorthand’, as well as the more practical ‘tangible reproduction of model’ and ‘draw spatial situation’. ‘At a time when art education is always being reduced or even got rid of, we wanted to show how current and relevant these assignments still seem today,’ says Wiedemeyer.

The final element that makes this show different is the interactivity. While many exhibitions claim to do this, few do it properly in practice. Here the curatorial team invited Berlin-based artists’ collective Syntop to create several digital stations where you can work on some of the Bauhaus’ preliminary course exercises.

You can draw an animal, create a collage, copy an image or produce a photogram, among other things. If you like what you make you can save it and the image is then projected on to a wall. It’s a straightforward but rewarding part of the exhibition that goes some way in showing just how comprehensive and pioneering the preliminary course was.

Without being deferential, ‘Original Bauhaus’ manages the rare task of breathing new insights and experiences into a movement that is at times too referenced for its own good.

INFORMATION

’Original Bauhaus’ was organised by the Bauhaus Archive Berlin and is on view at the Berlinische Galerie until 27 January 2020. bauhaus.de

ADDRESS

Alte Jakobstraße 124-128
Kreuzberg
Berlin

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‘He was a workaholic, but he was also a womaniser,’ Dr Angela Thomas Schmid recalls – not without affection – speaking of her late husband, the Swiss artist, architect, and designer Max Bill. The art historian is the president of Bill’s estate, and the curator of a small but insightful new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, exploring his ongoing exchanges with the masters of the Bauhaus.

Trained as a silversmith and an insatiable autodidact, Bill was only 16 when he had his first break abroad, thanks to Sophie Taeuber-Arp who spotted his talent at the design school in Zurich and presented his functional works in Paris for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. And it was the Parisian gallerist and patron Jeanne Bucher – whom Bill met later – who would push him to find his own style.

His participation in the exhibition at the Grand Palais and a trip with Taeuber-Arp to Paris instilled a great sense of confidence in Bill and inspired him to study modernist architecture. The following year, hearing that a new Bauhaus school was opening in Dessau, Bill applied and was accepted, aged 18, enrolling with the first cohort of students to attend in 1926.

He was taught by Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, and László Moholy-Nagy (the latter is concurrently subject of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s London gallery). Though he would continue to engage with the Bauhaus way of thinking, Bill later rejected an opportunity to join the teaching staff at the Bauhaus school in Chicago. Instead he founded, designed and built his own school in 1953, the Hoschschule fur Gestaltung, in Ulm.

Although these leading men of the Bauhaus undoubtedly had a major impact on Bill’s practice and thinking, his path was shaped just as much by the strong female students he met at the school. In the two years he would spend there, he ‘fell in love four times’, Schmid notes. But his fascination with women wasn’t only sexual interest. Impressed by the ideas of group of left wing, emancipated women with bobbed haircuts smoking cigarettes in the weaving workshops, it was their uninhibited dancing, reportedly, that encouraged Bill to unearth his own erotic energy.

Bill’s friendships with Katt Both and Hilde Rantzsch in particular are celebrated in a 1927 portrait he drew of the pair, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. His love of feminine forms is playfully commemorated in a photograph of Bill dressed up with breasts for a theatre performance at Dessau. Seen in parallel to the curving, swirling, circuitous forms of two resplendent metal sculptures, one of which is presented in public for the first time, his appreciation seems formal and deeper rooted.

As Schmid shooed away two men standing in front of a vitrine to make room to explain examples of Bill’s work better, it was also clear that the artist’s legacy in the future will continue to be carefully guided by female forces.

INFORMATION

‘Max bill bauhaus constellations’, 9 June – 14 September, Hauser & Wirth. hauserwirth.com

ADDRESS

Hauser & Wirth
Limmatstrasse 270
8005 Zurich

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A message was delivered during the inauguration of the 51st edition of commercial design fair Neocon last week. At the event in Chicago, keynote speakers Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of New York-based firm Roman + Williams urged designers to lead with the senses and honour history. Themes of tactility, natural elements, and blurred lines between work and the home continued throughout activations and launches, including those from Skyline Design, Designtex, Haworth and Stylex.

Skyline Design presented a collaboration with Paris-based designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, the Oblique and Chevron glass collection. Inspired by the luminous properties of stained glass and the natural world, these architectural-grade glass tiles provide an abstracted colour landscape. To achieve the ethereal, ombre patterns, colours from eight nature photographs taken by the Bouroullecs were digitally distilled and realigned to transmit optimal light, forming a sense of movement and atmospheric tone.

DesignTex launched The Bauhaus Project which celebrates women designers and tactile Bauhaus developments. Under license and collaborating with the estates of Bauhaus weavers Gunta Stoltz and Anni Albers, 16 minimally or never-produced designs were recreated. Innovative digital technologies and adaptive fibres are integrated into their production, bringing past designs into the modern work environment.

Patricia Urquiola’s designs for Haworth, specifically the Cabana Lounge, combats the chaos of the workplace with sound sensitive barriers that encourage in productivity and sensory protection. In doing so, the lounge is simultaneously private and communal. The rounded edges of the modular seating system produce an overall impression of softness and comfort, blurring the line between the work and home environments.

Stylex presented a set of smart work systems called Free Address, developed by Jay Koback and Ehren Gaag of Gensler. The seating and table sets support cooperative work in free-form creative environments, yet are disguised as sophisticated sofas and side tables for the home.

At Neocon, it was clear brands embraced sensory comfort, domesticity and balance – inside and outside of the workplace. Commercial environments were gearing towards our human experiences and how the space has an impact on our health, productivity, creativity and collaboration.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Neocon website

An esoteric, strength-testing sports instrument called a Cyr wheel seems an unlikely source of artistic inspiration, but that’s exactly what sparked the imagination of Christina Kruse. The German-born, New York-dwelling artist known for her photography had been buried deep in the work of Oskar Schlemmer, the Bauhaus polymath who turned the human body into geometry in his ballets, dances and theatre.

‘I was looking for ways to build a performance that is based on instinctive movement, creating an instinct-driven situation, that required me to learn technical movements rapidly – which in this case meant heightening the instinct to self-counterbalance,’ Kruse explains. ‘I designed a body suit – an arrangement of geometric shapes that would eventually alter if the instinct didn’t kick in early enough. The outcome of that geometric, alive form interested me: what would it look like if it failed at times, where would the volume of these body shapes be replaced to? It wouldn’t just disappear. And how far could the altered geometric body go on before it would collapse because of self-inflicted volume displacement?’

Kruse shares a natural affinity with the Bauhaus master, integrating design, art, and craft into each of her works, whether in two or three dimensions. She also shares Schlemmer’s ‘absence of colour and little sentiment or emotion’, explaining that to her, ‘there is a beauty in [his] almost rational approach’. Between her studio in Jersey City, shared with a painter friend, and another space upstate, Kruse has spent the last two years creating a new body of wood, bronze and brass sculptures informed by Schlemmer, referencing the lines of human bodies.

Now on view at New York’s Helwaser Gallery until 25 July, her solo exhibition ‘Base and Balance’ presents this sculptural work alongside some of her drawings and sketches – featured, she says, in order to give the interiors of the sculptures their own rightful place. ‘Imagine you are in a circus and then you leave and someone puts a huge blanket over the circus leaving it looking like a big old shape – it’s something around those lines.’ The sculptures are loosely grouped to recall a tableau vivant, reflecting the practices of the Bauhaus. Schlemmer would have been proud.

INFORMATION
‘Christina Kruse: Base and Balance’ is on view until 25 July. For more information, visit the Helwaser Gallery website

ADDRESS

Helwaser Gallery
833 Madison Avenue
New York

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Bauhaus bandwagon syndrom is rife this year. Though many new designs veer into gimmick, a select few capture the Gropius methodology, and merge craft and fine arts in both aesthetics and ideals. Here's an edit of the ones that work.

Gunta Stölzl's blanket, by Wallace Sewell

Textile design studio Wallace Sewell has been commissioned to recreate an original design for a lost blanket by Bauhaus weaver Gunta Stölzl. The Prellerhaus blanket was first made in 1926 for dormitories (pictured top) at the weaving workshops in Dessau, before the design was waylaid in the US after an exhibition there. Now, with help from Gunta Stölzl’s daughter, Wallace Sewell has realised the design, knitting the vision together from achive images.

The Wallace Sewell Prellerhaus blanket harks back to the original as closely as possible, picking up on the rhythm and simplicity of Stölzl’s design, but certain aspects have been updated. The original rayon material, for example, has been replaced with woollen fibres – more sustainable and desirable today.

Leica CL ‘100 Years of Bauhaus' special edition, by Leica

This week, Leica unveiled a new special edition of its popular CL camera. It maintains the same basic features as the traditional model (such as 24-megapixel sensor, fast autofocus and 4K video recording) while highlighting the Bauhaus anniversary through the school's historic logo, which is embossed into the camera’s leather covering. 
Only 150 units of the new Leica CL ‘100 Years of Bauhaus’ will be produced, so make it snappy.

Bauhaus-inspired prints, by Sascha Lobe for The Conran Shop

For London Craft Week 2019, Sascha Lobe – Pentagram partner and Wallpaper* Design Award 2019 winner – designed five limited-edition Bauhaus-inspired prints for The Conran Shop. In conjunction, a series of screenprinting sessions (pictured above) were coordinated by London-based digital print specialists Make-Ready. The prints combine 30 familiar Bauhaus glyphs with five epochal furniture pieces by the school’s key legacy holders: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. The resulting works feature 300 unique designs, which were all created live in store.

Bauhausmädels: A Tribute to Pioneering Women Artists, by Taschen

The female artists at the heart of Bauhaus – who often went under appreciated – overcame the societal expectations of their time to become pioneers in their own right. In Bauhausmädels. A Tribute to Pioneering Women Artists, trailblazers like Marianne Brandt, Gertrud Arndt, and Lucia Moholy are seen in a never-before-seen light. This visual exploration of Bauhaus' most underrated members seeks to give these pioneering ‘Bauhaus girls' overdue respect, through exclusive photographic portraits, incisive text from ‘communication scientist' Patrick Rössler, and biographical data.

Be inspired by their stories: these women faced unreasonable family expectations, the ambiguous attitude of the faculty and administration, outdated social conventions, and, ultimately, the political repression of the Nazi regime – and still managed to courageously elude traditional gender roles in aid of a different, creative future. Read our review of the book here. 

Ieoh Ming Pei, the Pritzker-prize winning Chinese-American architect renowned for his refined yet ground-breaking buildings has passed away at the age of 102. Although he leaves an indelible imprint on the architecture and urban fabric of his adopted country, America, many of his best-known works, such as the controversial installation of glass pyramids in the Louvre courtyard in Paris and Hong Kong’s 71-storey Bank of China skyscraper – a tower of steel and glass triangles – made him world-famous.

Instantly recognisable by his owlish tortoiseshell glasses, Pei was born into a prominent banking family in pre-revolutionary China on 26 April 1917. In 1935, aged 17, he moved to America to study architecture and engineering, first at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), before attending Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, under experimental Bauhaus modernists Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Although he had every intention of returning home, the outbreak of the Second World War meant he remained in America, where, in 1941, he became a citizen.

Pei claimed he was not proficient at sketching (he said he formed ideas by ‘drawing’ in his mind); yet his architectural vision was always evident. His thesis was the design of an art museum for Shanghai that avoided stereotypical Chinese architectural details and motifs, yet subtly expressed the quintessential archetype through the arrangement of the walls and the series of gardens – leading Gropius to later acknowledge there was room within the modernist vocabulary to imbue culturally-specific ideas.

After graduation, he worked for the US National Defence Research Committee and then in 1948, joined the flamboyant American real-estate developer William Zeckendorf, an experience Pei said was an invaluable lesson in understanding architecture’s relationship with real estate and politics.

In 1955, he opened his own architecture firm in New York, now known as Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and quickly became celebrated for his elegant, powerful designs for everything from museums to commercial and residential buildings. Civic projects were important to him and he used his considerable personal charm and networking skills to snap up plum commissions including the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.

Pei’s innate sense of geometry (the triangle, which he saw as a timeless form, especially was a recurring theme) and sculptural form was often associated with modernism, usually expressed in steel, glass and concrete. However, his approach, undeniably influenced by his Chinese roots, defies such simple classifications. In an unpublished interview with the art curator, critic and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2005, Pei explains how his first 17 years in China influenced the rest of his life and career. ‘My education is Chinese. When you get to that age, you are already formed. You may not already know it.’

Pei always began a project with what he called ‘a blank page’, eschewing preconceptions and instead focusing on the site’s circumstances, climate, history and people. This went far beyond mere lip service to a particular context: in 1989, when commissioned to renovate the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Pei did not draw a single line until he had spent four months, most of it incognito, at the Louvre, and reading French history.

His design, which included a large glass pyramid in the museum’s Cour Napoleon, created a new entrance into a subterranean concourse and was honoured by The American Institute of Architects in 2017 with the AIA 2017 25 Year Award, a prize awarded annually to a building that ‘has stood the test of time for 25-35 years, and continues to set standards of excellence for its architectural design and significance.’

‘I’m not a brand. All my projects are different. Why? It’s much richer if you learn first and work later,’ he told Obrist.

Pei was the first recognised American architect to work in China when the country was beginning to reopen in the 1970s, marking his return after four decades with the Fragrant Hill Hotel outside Beijing. The low-rise building arranged around courtyards stands in stark contrast to his futuristic Bank of China building in Hong Kong which immediately redefined the city’s skyline with its highly complex, unapologetically abstract angular form. It remains one of Pei’s finest and most original skyscrapers. As Pei explained to Obrist, he felt no need to make the building look Chinese: ‘To do a skyscraper, you should forget about Chinese history. There’s no connection.’

‘One of the things I most appreciate about Pei is how he negotiated the modernist strictures of his time to create an architectural language that was not just formally inventive, but also imbued with cultural meaning,’ says Aric Chen, curatorial director of Design Miami and curator-at-large of M+. ‘He was an architect of subtle contradictions: famous yet under-recognised, pragmatic yet insistent, disciplined but not afraid of breaking the rules.’

Although Pei retired from full-time work in 1990, he continued to win sought-after architectural commissions including Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art and the Miho Museum, where he embedded the museum within a forested mountain near Kyoto. After decades at the head of a large architectural practice, he saw this period as one that allowed him to indulge in creative projects.

In his eighties, he returned to his ancestral family home in Suzhou, China where with the Suzhou Museum he once again had the chance to incorporate China’s rich architectural traditions with modern design.

‘It was not just a project to him. He was very aware of Chinese culture,’ says Shanghainese architect Ling Bing. ‘One of the most important things he did then was to remind China of its cultural heritage. He knew that in a fast developing culture you don’t always pay enough attention to this. He would say, “It doesn’t have to be modern, it has to be sensitive.”’

Pei and his wife Elaine, who was a classmate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, married in 1942. The couple shared a lifelong love of art, becoming close friends with many, including Jean Dubuffet, Willem De Kooning and Barnett Newman. Pei elevated his passion for art to a consideration of space by commissioning great artists like Miró, Picasso and Henry Moore.

During his 60-year career, Pei received every important professional award including the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects (1979) and the Pritzker Prize (1983) where, in his acceptance speech, he said: ‘The chase for the new, from the singular perspective of style, has too often resulted in only the arbitrariness of whim, the disorder of caprice. It is easy to say that the art of architecture is everything, but how difficult it is to introduce the conscious intervention of an artistic imagination without straying from the context of life.’

In an era of so-called starchitects, Pei was a rare beacon of rigorous yet refined creativity rooted in an analytical approach to time, place and purpose.

Pei is survived by his sons Chien Chung (who goes by ‘Didi’), Li Chung, (who goes by ‘Sandi’) who run Pei Partnership Architects, and his daughter Liane. His son T’ing Chung passed away in 2003. 

There are strikingly few examples of the Bauhaus wearing glasses. Of the 12 on the cover of the school’s magazine from 1928 only two are bespectacled; the artist Wassily Kandinsky turns to his right, hair perfectly combed, wearing frameless oval glasses with slim arms. Typographer Joost Schmidt smiles to camera, two black rimmed circles around his kind eyes. Yet as the Bauhaus celebrates its centenary, Neubau – the eyewear brand from Silhouette – takes a fresh look at the school’s founding principles for a special edition frame.

Roland Keplinger, Neubau’s head of design says, ‘When you think about Bauhaus, you immediately think about the furniture’. Its impact on design, mass production and even technology is seismic. Toilets, trays and trousers have all laid claim to the group’s maxim: ‘form follows function.’ Since launching in 2016 as an environmentally responsible, made-in-Austria company, Neubau has combined quality with eco-positive design. Packaging is manufactured from a cellulose base without any need for glue and the cleaning cloth is made from recycled plastic bottles. Frames are made with oil extracted from the seeds of castor oil plants. They are radical in their weightlessness.

The archetypal Wassily Chair – designed by Marcel Breuer between 1925-1926 – informed the bended tube structure of the special edition frame. Keplinger says: ‘We used new technologies like 3D-printing and bending the titanium wire to be able to manufacture it on a big scale, exactly as the Bauhaus sought to do.’ The entire design took four months. ‘We also developed our own surface treatment for the 3D-printed parts so it has a nice matte surface and its colour stays,’ Keplinger says. The frame sits as a sculpture on the face or on a shelf.

The Bauhaus strived to formulate a way of working where craft came together with concept, and skill with social influence. Its teachers reunified practical disciplines like weaving, painting and handicrafts. ‘Art rises above all methods; in itself it cannot be taught, but the crafts certainly can be,’ Walter Gropius wrote in the Bauhaus Manifesto in April 1919. Neubau’s philosophy to mix art with new technologies and mass production isn’t dissimilar. ‘The Bauhaus didn’t completely fulfill its aims because the things they created were very expensive but some of the staff and students really had an aim to make design for the masses, a strong social conscience,’ Keplinger says.

The Walter & Wassily frame with its clear, unadorned lines, executed using limited materials as sustainably as possible, expresses Gropius’s ethos: ‘priority of creativity; freedom of individuality, but strict study discipline.’ It brings together function, form and fashion.

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Neubau website

On the occasion of the Bauhaus centenary, architect and historian Prof. Dr. Zvi Efrat was commissioned to create a short documentary by Germany’s ‘Bauhaus Imaginista' travelling exhibition programme, with the aim of uncovering a lesser known Bauhaus building that would demonstrate how Bauhaus ideas had spread across the world. Efrat picked the Obafemi Awolowo University located in Osun state, Nigeria. Originally known as the University of Ife, the campus was designed by Bauhaus graduate Arieh Sharon together with a team of Nigerian architects including Lagos-based architect A.A. Egbor between the 1960s and 1980s.

Efrat’s film takes a social journey through the university site – into covered outdoor spaces where students gather informally, past concrete buildings connected by pathways, up stairs and through courtyards where air circulates, light penetrates and shade cools. With his lens, Efrat wanted to capture how Bauhaus design and theory was combined with climactic and cultural specificity – most importantly with continuing success today.

The layers of the university’s history, and its meaning today, are as complex as its layered levels of architecture. The building represents an important moment in time for Nigeria as a symbol of its 1960 independence from Britain, while also at play is the national relationship between Europe, Israel and Nigeria as well as Arieh Sharon’s Bauhaus education. Even the act of Efrat’s own documentary-making is critical to the neccesary post-colonial conversation. As an architect, academic and author, Efrat was well positioned to approach all of these angles through his documentary.

The commission for the university project arose within a decade when political relations between Nigeria and Israel were aligned. ‘The year of 1960 was the moment of independence for Nigeria, when it was decolonized from the British. The country wanted to build a university that would represent Nigeria’s own ideas of democracy. They didn’t want to use British architects, nor architects of European powers, but Israel was also considered as a country that also had been decolonized a decade before by the British. Later however, 10 to 15 years on, Africa would reject Israel politically, and in the 1970s it would be not welcome,’ says Efrat.

Political events such as the rise of Hitler in Germany and the Independence of Israel from British mandate in 1948, lead to architect Sharon designing the University of Ife building. Sharon was studying architecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau under Hannes Meyer where he lived with his wife and daughter in one of the Master’s Houses, when in 1931 he was forced to leave to Palestine. There he became the lead architect of the Labour Unions under British mandate, designing communal workers houses in the Bauhaus style.

After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Sharon became the state architect in charge of master planning: ‘In 1950 Israel published a master plan, I call it the mould of Israel, which determined the shape of the state that we have today. Sharon is a very important figure in Israel, where he designed a lot of new towns and hospitals,’ says Efrat.

‘In the 1950s, the focus for Israel was looking inwards, but after that, in the 60s, they were looking for new frontiers and part of this was establishing new relationships with developing countries. Israel was going through a period of diplomacy, sending agricultural and military aid, but also sending skills such as engineering and architecture, specially in Africa.’

For Sharon, who passed away in 1984, the university was the largest project of his later years. He took it very seriously, explains Efrat, and travelled as far as Mexico City to search for a model for the building: ‘Alongside the local team of architects and the local academic leaders, Sharon was really working on a campus that would fit the Nigerian climate and culture. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew set up the “Tropical architecture” department at the AA, but it mainly dealt with the skin and envelope of the building – perforating the outer walls or creating screens – but it was just the same boxy architecture, but with better shading devices and ventilation.

‘Sharon [and other architects on the project] didn’t use their [Fry and Drew’s] approach, but invested in a new tropical system. They inverted a pyramid, using the upper floors to shade the lower floors, freeing up the ground floor to open corridors, columns and patios. The landscape beneath the building is continuous and a very smart positioning of the buildings allows for the free circulation of air through the buildings, an architecture without doors. Yet it also protects people from heavy rain, through balconies and canopies, and protects from the harsh sun, as well as constantly being ventilated. Today, it’s what we call passive architecture.’

Instead of a Bauhaus aesthetic, as seen in education buildings such as the Bauhaus School in Dessau or the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, the Ife University Campus strikes a conversation up between modernism and brutalism. ‘It’s not a thin building with glass walls, but a lot of the ideas of Bauhaus are very much there,’ says Efrat.

‘First of all, it’s an architecture that is a tool to create a better human habitat and bring about social change. Also more specifically, Hannes Meyer, second director of Bauhaus, and Sharon’s mentor, really emphasized the more scientific approach to architecture, where architecture is not just an aesthetic whim, but based on a rational study of climate and physical conditions. Sharon followed this, and based his design on several ecological studies. Modernism wanted to be international, but in this campus, we see the influence of local culture – we see decoration on the walls and shapes that correspond to Yoruba culture.’

There was, however, much that could not be understood about the building from its history or its design, which Efrat discovered when he arrived to start work on the documentary. ‘I thought I had a certain narrative in mind, but I realised I had all sorts of Western colonial, post-colonial and smart academic preconceptions,’ says Efrat.

Yet from working with a local team of photographers living in Lagos, and through his interviews with professors and students, his ideas evolved much further: ‘The film became about the perspective, capturing the everyday life of the campus, the spontaneity it creates through its form and a description of the place by the people who use it. People were the main subject matter of the film.'

He continues: ‘The first time we came to film, suddenly we heard drums and music, and a political campaign for a governors’ election came out of the blue through the campus, it was a huge party to welcome the candidate. The second time, we heard a more melancholic brass music, and a procession of drummers and dancers, it was a funeral processing through the open ground floor of the university. Down the covered passages, everything is visible, the campus is a stage for daily performances, musical events and academic activity, and that’s just normal, its a very lively situation.’

You’ll see from the stills, or if you get a chance to see the documentary, how the building is designed like an eco-system, making space for every type of activity – quiet moments for reading, long corridors for a walk, courtyards for communal gathering, cover for rainy days and open air for mild ones. The auditorium, for example, seats 3000 people, yet it is left open and small classes of students bring in boards and books to study in small groups or sit informally together.

The University of Ife was born of a moment in history where colonial powers, nationalities, skills, climates, people and movements passed like ships and collided. Yet, today, as the Obafemi Awolowo University, the building has its own identity, carved through daily function and use by the people who populate it. The latter is the portrait that Scenes from the most beautiful campus in Africa – A film about the Ife Campus catches in motion.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Bauhaus Imaginsta website

Weimar was the birthplace of Bauhaus – the modernist design and architecture school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. It was the philosophy and style of Gropius and his teachings at the Bauhaus school, based in Weimar from 1919 to 1925 before it moved to Dessau, that came to largely define the movement in the 20th century. So when plans were announced for the relatively small German town to receive its own grand museum dedicated to Bauhaus, it was a development that felt not just fitting; but possibly even long overdue. 

Now, the brand new structure has just opened, marking Bauhaus’ 100th anniversary, and is set to become a cultural heart for Weimar. Designed by architect Heike Hanada, the museum is a minimalist, white cube-shaped volume – a clean and elegant container for the precious and informative exhibits within (it contains temporary and permanent displays from the world’s oldest known Bauhaus collection). 

Spanning five levels and some 2,000 sq m of exhibition space, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar highlights the movement’s history and celebrates the age of modernism. A dramatic, cascading staircase connects different levels. At night, specially designed lighting will illuminate the building’s façade accentuating its clean, sharp shape.

‘The museum is reduced to a clearly defined, geometric form’, says Hanada. ‘The enclosing shell of light grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity.’ At the same time, the architect stresses that the building's connection to its context was very important, so open spaces around it and the welcoming, flowing staircase, were especially designed to draw people in and invite them to linger. Connections to nearby historical structures and parks also highlight the building’s sense of place.

‘When the Bauhaus Museum joins Weimar's museum landscape this weekend, the world will be watching,’ said Hellmut Seemann, president of Klassik Stiftung Weimar last week, ahead of the launch. And indeed it shall; revelling in the joy of seeing rare historical items on display – ahead of the country’s further Bauhaus-related openings upcoming this year including a new museum opening in Dessau this autumn

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Heike Hanada website

ADDRESS

Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1
99423
Weimar
Germany

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After 16 years of experience designing hotel interiors, André Fu knows that attention to detail will imbue even the most everyday item with timeless style. His first collection of homeware and decorative accessories – called Modern Reflections – launching at this year’s Salone del Mobile is no exception. Drawing on the clean, modernist aesthetic and multicultural nuances that are hallmarks of his spatial projects, Fu has created a holistic range of sleek furniture, carpets, lighting, tableware, bedding, and cashmere and silk textiles – plus more.

The Hong Kong-based architect says that his extensive, cross-category line of 150 pieces offers a ‘cohesive narrative that goes beyond aesthetics.’ Multiple elements in the range complement each other perfectly – from an elegantly curved dressing table that interlinks a touch of Bauhaus with a hint of Asian sensibility in a Chinese moon-gate-inspired circular shape, to a family of brushed bronze lantern-like lamps.

‘Asian craft is deep in my roots, and there are subtle references in many of the objects, but my focus has been on creating everyday objects that transcend cultures,’ Fu explains.

Fu’s Milan installation is where his architectural training shows, with a series of bold yet minimalist mineral blue enclosures inspired by the crisp geometric architecture of Jaipur’s eighteenth century Jantar Mantar Observatory, which unfold throughout the first floor of a Milanese villa.

Fu’s porcelain crockery reflects a similarly thoughtful cultural blend of plates, bowls and serving platters that suit dim sum as well as a classic roast, and are available in two ‘design languages’ – a sumi-e-style brush stroke pattern, and geometric designs typically found in 1960s modernist architecture.   

‘True luxury is in the living experience, so I wanted to focus on the person and the places within the home where they relax, sleep, dine and dress,’ Fu explains.

INFORMATION

Modern Reflections will be on view 9-14 April. For more information, visit the André Fu Living website

ADDRESS

Via St Damiano 2
Milan
20122

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What makes a true Bauhaus girl? Contemporary, cheerful and cool, she has a self-confident, gung-ho attitude, a short bob, and a talent for the fine and applied arts. Or at least, that’s according to a groundbreaking three-page spread, published by Die Woche newspaper in January 1930 in a politically turbulent Germany. The article is illustrated with photographs of these newly emancipated Bauhaus women taken by ‘Lutz Feininger’ – 19-year­-old T Lux Feininger, and the youngest son of German-American painter Lyonel Feininger, master printmaker at the Bauhaus school.

The female side of the Bauhaus story and the remarkable rise of the Bauhausmädel (‘Bauhaus girl’) is explored in depth in a new Taschen book, bringing together the lives of many women who shaped and disseminated their ideas, with little or no recognition in their day. (The captions for photographs illustrating the original article on the Bauhaus woman had been published anonymously, perhaps written by a woman, since women were not considered appropriate contributors to magazines at the time.)

Among them is Ricarda Schwerin, an atheist who, aged 18, went to the Bauhaus to study photography. A few semesters in, she had to stop her studies due to poor health, and when she recovered the school refused to have her back. She wound up in Frankfurt am Main with her future husband and fellow Bauhaus student Heinz Schwerin who, like Schwerin, had been prevented from completing his studies (the school ejected most of its communist students in the spring of 1932). Soon after their vows in Hungary were sealed in 1935, the newlyweds fled to Palestine. Together they opened a wooden toy workshop; Schwerin later founded a nursery for refugee children. Only then did she go back to photography, working for two decades up until her death in 1999, aged 87.

Hers is just one among 87 women who attended the pioneering school of art and design, each of them unique, but facing similar societial expectations and political demands: the Nazi regime pressing down on them, forcing many to emigrate multiple times, and lose husbands to war. Other more famous names include Marianne Brandt, one of the first women to be admitted to the Bauhaus metalworking program, and whose designs continue to be produced by Alessi to this day.

The book does not brush over the ‘entirely problematic gender relations at the Bauhaus’, as author Patrick Rössler writes, ‘in particular with regard to the balance of power between masters and students’. As his introductory essay points out, despite its indisputable influence in the world and its inherently progressive ideals, the Bauhaus was shockingly archaic when it came to women. The tome bursts forth to right that wrong and put the Bauhaus women unequivocally back in their place, with their photographs – some of them sumptuous self-portraits – and biographies organised as a timeline of life events. For all of their achievements, many of their lives did not end well.

Unfortunately, given the erasure of these women from history, there is no real documentation of their works, only portraits of the women, which after a while seems to put the emphasis on what they looked like, rather than the importance of their contributions to the Bauhaus and its legacy. Among the few works are a series of nude photographs by Lucia Moholy, irreverent, whimsical and free. Moholy’s took iconic photographs of the school’s teachers and of the new Bauhaus buildings, but the negatives were withheld by Walter Gropius and only eventually returned to her in 1959.

The ultimate lesson of the Bauhaus girl might come from that 1930 Die Woche article: ‘The Bauhaus girl knows what she wants and will make it anywhere’ – no matter who, or what, tries to hold her back.

Bauhausmädels: A Tribute to Pioneering Women Artists, published by Taschen, available from Amazon

How can design shape the future? Over ten days, Melbourne Design Week 2019 (14-24 March) addresses how experimentation with new materials and disruptive approaches can improve the urban environment and sharpen our social consciousness.

The National Gallery of Victoria forms the event hub, where ‘visitors will have the opportunity to experience pioneering design concepts, hear from world-leading experts and encounter cutting-edge technologies that will help us all consider new and innovative possibilities for the future,’ explains its director, Tony Ellwood AM. Presenting its largest program to date, the expanding state-wide festival includes 47 exhibitions, 16 film screenings, 81 talks, 33 tours and 18 workshops.

Curated by Guy Keulemans, ‘Designwork #3: The Supply Chain’ at Sophie Gannon Gallery challenges leading Australian designers including Henry Wilson and Elliat Rich to address the value of rejected prototypes, and how industrial supply chains are effected by labour offences, environmental crimes and sovereignty. Here, paper artist Benja Harney turns offcuts into furniture, questioning how we can consider waste as a resource, while Luca Lettereiti uses his body as a material to ensure proprietary of the end product.

Showcasing the work of some of Australia’s most innovative furniture, lighting and product designers is exhibition ‘Material Thought’, held within Modern Times, a furniture showroom in Fitzroy. The display counteracts the simplistic and implied categorisation of materials – sustainable/unsustainable, natural/synthetic, handmade/factory-made, recycled/new – providing a platform that critically engages with material, form and use.

Within the store windows of the ethical clothing label ELK, ceramicist and lighting designer Claire Lehmann realises two connecting shapes from bone china – one black, one opaque. Her designs (influenced by plumbing, air-conditioning, heating and wiring) convey the delicate strength of industrial design, challenging the aesthetics of domestic conventions.

While innovation is a key motivator for designers, the program also explores the benefits of reflecting on past movements. ‘New Haus: 72 Hours’, presented by art and design school LCI Melbourne, showcases furniture, weaving, screen prints, graphic and typography design created during a 72-hour intensive workshop (which visitors can observe). Inspired by the centenary of the influential Bauhaus movement, they devise futuristic adaptations of its successful models.

New York-based architectural practice SO-IL, who recently announced their collaboration with Hassell to redesign Melbourne’s arts precinct public spaces (between the NGV, Arts Centre and Southbank), re-contextualise over 50 porcelain objects from the NGV’s Decorative Arts collection. Activating a dialogue between the relevance of the past and contemporary design, they are displayed in geometric vitrines made from coloured dichroic acrylic. ‘It’s about a transition from object to experience, and the power of architecture to act as a mediator in that process,’ explains SO-IL’s co-founder, Jing Liu.

Elsewhere, The Ian Potter Museum presents the first major survey of the renowned Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore’s early career as a furniture and lighting designer. Part of a new wave of Australian design in the 1950s, it eschewed the heaviness of traditional furniture in favour of streamlined forms, new materials and inventive manufacturing.

INFORMATION

Melbourne Design Week is on view 14 – 24 March. For more information, visit the website

The sawtooth roof and distinctive curving bridge ramp of the Bauhaus archive and museum in Berlin are instantly recognisable around the world. So when Staab Architekten won the competition to extend the Walter Gropius-designed site they were very aware that they couldn’t – and didn’t want – to do anything that would overshadow the existing structures, or, as practice founder Volker Staab puts it, ‘turn it into a secondary building'.

The architects’ answer to this specific constraint is a 6,700 sq m extension, due to complete in 2022, composed of a slender five-storey glazed tower that will house the museum’s public amenities and educational facilities, a low-slung pavilion containing a café and shop, and a series of underground museum galleries that will spill out onto a cloister-style walkway and inner courtyard.

The new exhibition spaces will be built around the existing sunken garden and below the pedestrian ramp, creating a natural connection between the new and old museum foyers while preserving views of the famous silhouette of fins. The one-storey building will act as a wall and noise buffer between the busy street north of the site and, together with the tower, create a more substantive and symbolic entrance for the new ensemble. ‘Before, the Gropius building had parking in front of it and didn’t really address the road, so this has been much improved by the new design,' says Staab.

Though the project doesn’t pay tribute to the Bauhaus in a formal way – ‘it isn’t a white cube', says Staab with a smile – the tower references the experimental and revolutionary nature of the movement – specifically the revolution in building systems the school embraced – in the way it is designed. Whereas Bauhaus acolytes promoted a sort of revolution in construction, Staab and his team celebrate the digital revolution in their tower design. ‘The construction of the tower was only possible through digital calculations and parametric optimization tools,' he explains. ‘We could never have done the calculations in an analogue way.'

The results are alluring. The thin vertical load-bearing columns that surround the building are slightly angled and appear to be ‘softly dancing and somehow fragile', according to Staab. The permeability of the resulting structure also harks back to the open, interactive approach of the Bauhaus. The existing Gropius building will also be restored to its original condition and internal additions taken out as part of the extension project. Most importantly perhaps, the films used to darken the windows and preserve the exhibits will be removed, bringing back the connection between the outside and inside, and the views in from the pedestrian walkway. When the new site completes the Gropius building will once again function primarily as an archive. Overall the new museum extension by Staab Architekten is quietly audacious yet respectful; and transforms what was a somewhat lacklustre and confusing site into something far more legible with a sense of place and a heart in its new interior plaza. ‘The staff told us they would often find people wandering around the promenade looking for the entrance to the museum,' explains Staab. (In fact only the archive could be entered from the walkway, while the museum was always one floor down.) Originally, the archive was supposed to be located on a hilly site in Darmstadt, southern Germany. The way it was adapted to its new and flat site in Berlin was never entirely satisfactory, believes Staab. ‘But by then Gropius wasn’t involved anymore and it was his office that completed the building after his death.' Though it is impossible to tell conclusively from renderings and models, this extension looks set to vastly improve the experience of visiting and working in the Gropius archive and museum, while keeping the silhouette and importance of the pedestrian access route intact. Plus it throws in a delightful experimental landmark of its own, for good measure.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Staab Architekten

Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture has long been a draw for design devotees, who travel to the Israeli city to see the some 4,000 Bauhaus-style buildings that were built there from the 1930s onwards. Designed by German-Jewish architects who immigrated to the region to escape the Nazi regime, the white plaster apartment buildings have been attracting increased interest in recent decades – particularly since 2004, when Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site and approximately 1200 buildings were listed for preservation.

‘The city followed and established policies and categories of preservation in order to encourage their renovations, retrofits and extensions,’ explains local architect Avital Gourary, who believes that the continued popularity of the Bauhaus buildings is down to their modest architectural language. ‘What followed is that investors, developers, architects and designers took an integral part of what the city is going to become. It created many opportunities.

Gourary, who runs Tel Aviv firm AN + alongside architect Natanel Elfassy, recently restored a 1930s building in Neve Tzedek, one of the city's oldest districts. The 600 sq m property was snapped up ten years ago by Bauhaus enthusiast and hospitality entrepreneur Mati Broudo, who fell in love with the location. The renovation process saw the architects empty the centre of the building and carve it into three apartments and two studios.

Now it is the home of local hospitality entrepreneur Mati Broudo.

‘We introduced a new stairwell, which was a major characteristic of the modern movement,' explains Gourary. ‘It appears on the façade as a glazed wall that's nicknamed the "thermometer window". Our aim was to give back the stairwell its social and environmental importance that used to exist in the time these buildings were built.

‘Thanks to a skylight above and the fact that it's open to the exterior on one side, the stairwell also functions as a patio. This light-flooded indoor/outdoor space connects the entrance, the apartments, the backyard, and the roof garden. ‘The patio is the place where people meet, feel the breeze, and interact with the neighbours,' says Gourary.

Inside the apartments, the interiors are designed as open plan spaces that cleverly merge social and private spaces while providing a level of separation. For example, bedrooms are visually separated by sliding walls or split levels, but remain part of the living spaces. 

The White City of Tel Aviv has been declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site due to its large concentration of Bauhaus architecture.

Keen to retain the building's original character, the architects spent a great deal of energy mapping out the relationship between old and new. The outlines of the old structure's windows, for instance, are reproduced onto the new inner facades of the patio allowing views into the surrounding spaces, public or private.

‘Our intention was to create the most intelligent design possible, not the most spectacular one,' explains Gourary. ‘With the Broudo House we wanted to show that with small architectural intervention you can turn an existing building, into a new piece of architecture. Not because it will necessarily be more beautiful but because our act will clearly express an intention of turning the existing building into something new. That's what we called "Rethinking Bauhaus".'

Explore more Bauhaus coverage here

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the AN + website

What do Anni Albers, John Hurt and Caligula have in common? All have in some way inspired Claudia Wieser’s eclectically referenced exhibition at the Bloomberg HQ in London. In the Bloomberg SPACE gallery – built directly above the ruins of an ancient Roman temple and underneath Stirling Prize-winning offices designed by Foster + Partners – the German artist has created a new installation that effortlessly timeshifts between the location’s heritage and its contemporary architecture.

Wieser, who is currently exhibiting work with similar themes at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery, has long drawn inspiration from the Roman Empire, and so was a natural choice for the Bloomberg commission. Here, Roman ruins slumber beneath the gallery, along with a selection of artefacts recovered during the site’s restoration in the 1950s, which Wieser has responded to with a series of colourful tabletop wooden sculptures. She imagined the punch of colours as they might have been in Roman Londinium, when the objects were first created, alongside some ‘notably contemporary’ bright blues and pale pinks, that she thinks will appeal to the modern eye.

Fractured mirrored works send disrupted reflections around the space – as if splicing a timeline – while vast swathes of collaged wallpaper feature fragments of images repurposed from the 1970s BBC production of I, Claudius, featuring the actor John Hurt as Caligula, plaited with strips of new photographs taken by the artist. Tiled benches (which Wieser encourages visitors to sit on) complete the varied installation, showcasing the breadth of her material and formal understanding. ‘I trained as a blacksmith, which taught me to respect materials’, she explains. ‘And I also worked as a set designer on films, so understand the importance of spatial awareness in an exhibition.’

Wieser – who has exhibited widely across the United States and mainland Europe, but narrowly in London – hopes this exhibition will mark the start of a greater art affair with the city. She made a point of catching the Anni Albers exhibition at Tate Modern during her brief and busy stay in the capital, noting how the artist has ‘inspired her work’. Nowhere is this more evident than on Wieser’s hand-painted tiles, which patchwork colourfully as if formed on a loom. This nod to historical German design cleverly roots the exhibition in yet another seasonable timeframe: the Bauhaus centenary, which continues to be celebrated across Europe this year.

INFORMATION

‘Shift’ is on view at Bloomberg SPACE in London until 31 July, and ‘Forum’ is on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco until 2 March. For more information, visit the London Mithraeum website and the Jessica Silverman Gallery website

Painter, furniture designer, colour theorist, glassmaker, writer, educator: Josef Albers was a man for all seasons. More surprising still, he also had a knack for designing album covers. A new exhibition, ‘Sonic Albers’, opening at David Zwirner’s 537 West 20th Street gallery sheds light on the artist’s lesser-known relationship to music and sonic phenomena through paintings, drawings, glassworks and other ephemera from throughout his career.

Albers’ foray into album art came late in his life at 71 years old, nearly a decade after he began his seminal Homage to the Square series. Command Records was established in 1959 by Enoch Light, a classically trained violinist, band leader and sound engineer with an exceptionally sophisticated approach to stereo recordings (his penchant for lengthy technical descriptions similarly resulted in the creation of the gatefold sleeve). He enlisted Charles E Murphy as design director, who in turn tasked his former Yale professor – none other than Albers – with a handful of the label’s earliest jacket designs.

Fuge (Fugue), c 1926, by Josef Albers. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Produced over three years between 1959 and 1961, Albers’ seven album sleeves for Command Records incorporated elements such as circles and grids of dots, highly uncommon in his practice. (These have only ever featured in the sandblasted glass door panels he designed for the Todd Theater in Chicago, and a series of Christmas and Happy New Year cards he produced with his wife Anni Albers for personal use – the latter of which are also on view at the New York exhibition). Albers echoed the avant-garde musical compositions with synaesthetic designs evocative of the tempos the percussion instruments featured on the track.

Music had underscored Albers’ work since his early days as an artist, from his expressionistic sketches of dancers and flute players in the 1910s to the rarely seen sandblasted glass pieces produced during his Bauhaus years in the 1920s and 1930s. His fascination with the rhythmic quality of lines and the interrelation between movement and the visual experience is palpable in works such as Klaviaturen (Keyboards) (1932) and his Treble Clef series (1932-1935). ‘Nobody expects that a composer, before composing his work, is going into the woods to listen to a roaring lion or a barking dog, or something nicer, a singing nightingale or blue jay,’ mused the artist in a 1935 paper on abstract art he presented at Asheville City Hall, North Carolina. ‘Everybody thinks that it is all right that he composes out of his imagination, his material, the tones. And it is all right that no nature at all has had influence upon his work. Why should we painters not have the same right to combine, like the musician, our medium – form, colours, proportions and so on?’ And Albers was, in his own right, a maestro of modernism.

INFORMATION

‘Sonic Albers’ is on view 8 January – 16 February. For more information, visit the David Zwirner website and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation website

ADDRESS

David Zwirner
537 West 20th Street
New York

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When Barcelona-based addenda architects won the competition to design the Bauhaus museum in Dessau in late 2015 there were some interesting parallels between the way they worked and the Bauhaus philosophy. As a collective of five architects from different parts of Spain and Europe, who developed the design in a collaborative way, addenda’s process was ‘closely connected with the seminal Bauhaus conception of a creative community', explains the firm’s José Zabala.

Their proposal, which won out of 831 entries, is simple yet striking. Composed of a long, rectangular concrete bridge structure ‘floating’ inside a glass shell or curtain wall, it relates to Bauhaus principles ‘visually through its form and reduced palette of materials', says Zabala, ‘although its shape and appearance is more about the idea of a bold and economic structure rather than about being a formal recreation of a modern building', he adds.

Designing for flexibility and openness, as well as for the display of the world’s second-largest Bauhaus collection of objects, many made out of paper, required highly climate-controlled technical spaces that proved to be one of the project’s biggest challenges. The architects’ solution was to provide a hermetic black box on the upper storey for the presentation of the collection, while a transparent ground floor would become a permeable and dynamic public space where the city and museum come together in a generous foyer, a temporary exhibition space, a restaurant and various events spaces.

The decision to locate the museum in the city’s central park and not next to the famous Bauhaus school building or master’s houses a little northwest of the centre was a conscious one, says Claudia Perren, director and chief executive officer of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. ‘We wanted to be right in the middle of the city and not create a museum island', she explains. 

The central location will help to ‘amplify the Bauhaus cultural effect' throughout the city agrees Zabala, but also ‘generate interest and attract visitors to compensate for the “shrinking city effect” experienced by certain German cities after reunification'. The hope is that the museum, which is due to complete on September 9, 2019, in time to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Bauhaus school next year, will become not only a magnet for Bauhaus aficionados from Germany and the world, but also a lively meeting spot and cultural venue for the city itself.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the addenda architects website

Among the farmers, labourers, religious zealots and political refugees who washed up on the shores of British-controlled Palestine during the inter-war period was German architect Erich Mendelsohn. Fleeing the rise of Nazism, Mendelsohn landed in the Levant in 1934, leaving behind a decade’s worth of prominent commissions in both Germany and Britain.

In Palestine, then a country in the making, Mendelsohn found an unblemished canvas on which he could inscribe an evolving aesthetic as much informed by his sophisticated past as by his idealistic visions for the nation’s future. Emboldened by the potential of this desert utopia and lauded by its nascent intellectual class, the modernist Mendelsohn unabashedly enthroned himself as Palestine’s chief architect. ‘Palestine of today symbolises a union between the most modern civilisation and a most antique culture,’ he wrote. ‘It is the place where intellect, vision, matter and spirit meet.’

Although his stay in Palestine was relatively brief, in seven years Mendelsohn completed a series of buildings that formed many of the principles of early Israeli architecture. His Hebrew University medical complex remains a key Jerusalem landmark. The nearby Anglo-Palestine Bank (now Bank Leumi) still looms large over the capital’s central pedestrian area. And his private home for retail magnate Salman Schocken serves to this day as a study in European formality balanced by the climatic demands of its arid, mountainous perch.

While these commissions were noteworthy for their elegance and size, it is Mendelsohn’s Villa Weizmann – the residence of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann – that stands as his most crucial contribution to the nation’s architectural treasury. The 22-room building is set amid orange groves on an 11-acre estate in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. The estate is now the home of the Weizmann Institute of Science, but was merely an agricultural settlement at the time of construction, from 1934 to 1936.

Although modest in ambition, the house in many ways represents the purest example of Mendelsohn’s West-meets-East style, thanks to its dramatic, spiral staircase – a seminal Mendelsohn signature element back in Europe. The staircase rises from the ground floor and is capped three stories later by a squat, circular tower. Enclosed in a concrete wall sliced with vertical glass panels, the stairway both centres the house’s façade and anchors an abstract, Arabian inner courtyard, where a rectangular reflecting pool is balanced by a library on one side and a drawing room on the other.

This riad-like nod to the region’s traditional vernacular is the exception rather than the rule at Villa Weizmann. Instead, the building is evocative of the Bauhaus-on-the-beach aesthetic developing in urban Palestine at the time, only with fancier flourishes. With the house lacking air-conditioning, these decorative details are as much about function as form. They are best expressed in the numerous windows, which allow air to circulate continually.

On the ground floor, porthole windows line many of the rooms at ceiling level, while large glass doors lead from the library and drawing room straight to the pool. Even the glass panels that encircle the staircase can be opened to the elements. Marble floors throughout the building, an imported extravagance during an era of austerity, are yet another defence against the humidity and heat.

Although harsh on the house, the extreme heat and humidity of Rehovot provided Mendelsohn with the opportunity to exercise his green fingers in ways not possible back in temperature Europe or in the drier, more desert-like Jerusalem hills. Visible from nearly every corner of the house, the gardens are nothing if not ambitious, flowing down and around the site in sharp contrast to the building’s rectilinear rigidity. There are semicircular terraces laden with shrubs, as well as olive and fig trees. Meanwhile, cypress, magnolia, oleander and jacaranda place the gardens within Palestine’s native vernacular in a way Mendelsohn felt unable to express up at the house.

Now almost 70 years old and surrounded by the sophisticated laboratories of the Weizmann Institute, Villa Weizmann still retains its air of architectural and historical authority, living on as a national museum. In 2001, a meticulous renovation of the house was carried out by architect Hillel Schoken, the grandson of Mendelsohn’s primary patron back in Berlin, Salman Schocken.

Now a professor of architecture at Tel Aviv University, the younger Schocken installed air-conditioning and new ceramic kitchen tiles, retouched the house’s numerous windows and replastered its façade. Schocken also designed a new glass, steel and stone pavilion on the property in order to house Weizmann’s prized, custom-made 1952 Lincoln Cosmopolitan limousine, one of only three manufactured. Schocken’s aim with the renovation was to pick up where Mendelsohn left off: ‘If Mendelsohn entered the house today, he would see it as something he had designed.’

Sadly, Villa Weizmann did not mark the start of an era of Mendelsohnian modernism in Palestine and the architect never achieved his dream of becoming the new state’s design mastermind. Chastened by economic realities and propelled by ambition, he decamped for the United States in 1941, leaving behind an often overlooked oeuvre of Mediterranean marvels. ‘Mendelsohn was always an outsider, never exactly accepted by the Bauhaus,’ says Schocken. ‘But his time in Israel and buildings such as Villa Weizmann demonstrate his ability to understand the new and admirably adapt to his environment.’ §

As originally featured in the May 2004 issue of Wallpaper* (W*68)

For the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus, Thonet and Hamburg-based design studio, Besau Marguerre have teamed up to bring an element of contemporary luxury to the S 533 F chair designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1927. The limited-edition of the renowned steel framed cantilever chair has been given a new look with a grey and rose colour scheme, bringing a sensual sheen to the brusque Bauhaus chair.

Studio Besau Marguerre, founded by Marcel Besau and Eva Marguerre in 2011, has created two new versions of the S 533 F with added armrests lending a softer appearence and feel. Looking to find a contrast between ‘objectivity and softness’, one chair has a pearl gloss chrome frame and anthracite-coloured nubuck-effect bend leather, with the other in matt champagne chrome with nubuck leather in soft rose.

‘I think they’re very good at putting together materials and colours, creating something out of very little, and giving enhancement that doesn't betray the design, but keeps validity,’ says Norbert Ruf, creative director at Thonet. ‘It’s a very fresh look on the Bauhaus classic. It pushes a little bit of luxury, but doesn’t go over the edge,’ he says.

The designers referenced the original design through the warm, yet neutral colours that reference the lighter nickel-plated patina of the first cantilever chairs from the 1920s and 1930s. ‘While most designs from the 1920s were rather simple and function, this chair clearly reveals the architect’s signature: here, Mies combines functionality and comfort with timeless aesthetics – and that’s precisely what we wanted to bring into the present,’ says Marcel Besau.

Softness and flexibility were integral to Mies van der Rohe’s design that was specifically shaped to adapt and cushion the movement of the user with its large arch of hardened tubular spring steel. The designers have enhanced the user experience of this Bauhaus classic, by applying their knowledge and signanature sensual approach to design that can be felt across their other projects such as the furniture series for the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.

Studio Besau Marguerre were recommended to Thonet through German designer Stefan Diez, whom Eva Marguerre studied under. (‘I usually ask people who I believe have a good feeling for other people,’ says Ruf of his selection process for collaborators). Ruf remembers being impressed by ‘a small colourful stool that was dipped into resin’ designed by Marguerre early on in her career. 

With backgrounds in product design as well as exhibition and graphic design, Besau and Marguerre are based in the district of Eimsbüttel in Hamburg, a place where – like the Bauhaus – there is a community of designers working together and collaborating

Thonet’s history is based upon collaboration and craftsmanship too – the manufacturer opened its workshop in Boppard on the River Rhine in 1819, first mastering the art of the chair no.14, the Vienna Coffee House chair, and pioneering the technique of bending solid beech wood. The next challenge would be the tubular steel furniture, designed by the Bauhaus architects Mart Stam, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer in the 1930s. By this time, always in chase of innovation, Thonet had grown from workshop into its vast headquarters and production site in  Frankenburg, Germany. Today, working on collaborations with designers to bring limited-editions to the market is an expression of this continued experimentation and innovation, mixing contemporary expression with years of expertise and skill.

‘It's been a very positive and constructive collaboration,’ says Ruf of the Studio Besau Marguerre edition. ‘The first collaborations with designers and interior architects are always the most difficult because there’s a lot of trial and error, trying to find a similar language, and to communicate what Thonet is and needs, what’s credible for our market, and also to understand how to find a compromise – after all that, it’s then a lot easier to build on the know-how for another collaboration.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Thonet website and the Studio Besau Marguerre website

To mark the 100 years since the birth of the Bauhaus art, design and architecture movement, Germany is restoring and renovating its existing Bauhaus buildings and opening two new museums dedicated to the school and its revolutionary output. The first is due to be inaugurated on April 6th 2019 and located in Weimar in eastern Germany.

Designed by Berlin-based architect Heike Hanada, it will be the first dedicated space for showcasing the collection of objects and projects created and made in the city between 1919 and 1926 (after that the school was forced to relocate to Dessau due to political and financial pressures).

The museum is conceived as a monolithic cube sitting atop a concrete base with an exterior defined by horizontal ‘floating’ panels of opaque glass and an asymmetrical grid of fine black lines that create a regular rhythm. At night, 24 white LED lines light up and accentuate the building’s geometry.

The interplay between horizontal and vertical lines continues inside the raw concrete-lined interiors that are less classical art museum and more industrial workshop spaces in which the visitors are supposed to be active participants, explains Hanada. A series of double-height voids punctuate the building offering unexpected perspectives, framed views and surprising visual connections inside and out, while the museum’s dramatic cascading staircase is echoed in the concrete beam ceiling above. 

The new Bauhaus museum sits on the edge of a slope in the city’s Weimarhallenpark and can be accessed from two points, a terrace that spills out onto the park at basement level and an entrance six metres higher up at street level on the other side. Not only does it connect the city with the park but its location is particularly significant because it stands between the public green space created during the Weimar Republic and the monumental Gauforum complex built by the Nazis in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a symbol of their power. 

‘The decision by the city to locate the museum between these two historical manifestations is an outstanding one,' believes Hanada, who says the new museum is designed to stand its ground against its politically charged neighbour. ‘By placing the museum here we aren’t only highlighting the founding of the Bauhaus but also the forces that expelled it from the city. In this sense the Bauhaus was not only a gathering of brilliant modern artists and architects but also an intellectual position that is still very relevant today.' 

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Heike Hanada and the website of Benedict Tonon

Bauhaus exhibitions in galleries and musuems across the world are plenty in 2019. Here we look at some of the shows shedding light on the school and consequent movement of modernism.

From its founding in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, and subsequent closure in 1933, the Bauhaus theories and ideas spread out across the world through the architects (and their pupils) who attended the school to many different geographical places.

Germany’s ‘Bauhaus Imaginista’ programme features four exhibitions worldwide (China, Japan, Russia and Brazil)  that are happening this year and next, while a string of institutional exhibitions across Germany look at the waves Bauhaus made in the nation of its founding...

Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain 1933–66

The Royal Institute of British Architects explores the development of British modernist architecture through the influence of the Bauhaus movement. The exhibition focuses on the work of three notable Bauhaus émigrés – Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy – and their impact during their brief time in Britain. The work of Denys Lasdun, Eric Lyons, and Mary Crowley (later Medd), leading innovators in post-war British architecture, will be examined within the context of Bauhaus. Highlights include drawings and plans of the unbuilt Isokon 3 building, photographs by ex-Bauhaus student Edith Tudor-Hart and archival films from the 1930s including work by László Moholy-Nagy. Exhibition design by Chile-based practice Pezo Von Ellrichshausen promises an enjoyable aesthetic experience in the gallery.

Netherlands – Bauhaus: Pioneers of a new world

The principles of Bauhaus resonated in the Netherlands through architecture, design and design education and many Dutch artists, architects and designers contributed to the development of this German movement. This exhibition explores this relationship through around 800 objects of architecture, design, textiles, photography and typography, with a focus on Rotterdam, between the two world wars, where Dutch modernism founds its expression. The time frame starts pre-Bauhaus when Dutch practitioners joined Deutsche Werkbund set up in 1907, to the influence of the De Stijl magazine during the school and then to post-Bauhaus when several members came to the Netherlands.

Frankfurt Modernism 1919-1933

This exhibition is a celebration of modern design in Frankfurt am Main in the 1920s, when the city became a hub for design. Beyond the ‘New Frankfurt’ housing construction programme initiated by Ernst May, the city adopted modernism in many other ways, from fashion to interiors, products and communication design. This activity was happening alongside industrialisation and the devlopment of urban communities. Key pieces of architecture represent the period: the reconstructed trade fair, the city’s building department and the Frankfurt art school, which underwent significant reorientation under Fritz Wichert.

Josef Rings and Erich Mendelsohn: New building in Germany and Mandatory Palestine

In collaboration with Moses Mendelsohn Zentrum in Potsdam and Alte Synagoge Essen, the Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv presents and exhibition exploring the two architects styles in their respective geographic locations. The exhibition was supported by the ‘100 years Bauhaus in the West’ project from the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia and other German regional organisations.

Bauhaus Imaginista, Learning from São Paulo

The Bauhaus Imaginista programme moves beyond the framework of Bauhaus in Germany (1919–33) exploring its international reach. In an exhibition as part of the ‘Learning From’ series of events, SESC São Paulo and the Goethe-Institut São Paulo present an exhibition that looks at the role of Bauhaus in areas of premodern, indigenous and precolonial craft practices in the American continents.

The exhibition is located at São Paulo’s SESC Pompéia, a former factory converted into a cultural centre by Lina Bo Bardi. Inspired by the Bauhaus, Bo Bardi established the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), in 1951 at the Museum of Art São Paulo (MASP) and her work is present as a thread throughout the exhibition.

Original Bauhaus, Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in cooperation with the Berlinische Galerie

This exhibition presents the ‘famous, familiar and forgotten Bauhaus originals’ including art and design objects from the Bauhaus-Archiv’s collection, loans from international collections and the history behind them and re-examine the Bauhaus legacy. The 14 objects will each be a case study for more questions, for example: How did the woman sitting on the tubular-steel chair become the most famous anonymous figure from the Bauhaus? And, does the Haus am Horn in Weimar have a secret twin?

See more on Bauhaus here

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Bauhaus 100 website

‘Anni Albers avoided defining herself in narrow terms and was constantly innovating and exploring new avenues for creating art,’ says Lucy Weber, director of Albers by Design at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The extensive and experimental output of the Bauhaus pioneer is currently on display at the Tate Modern, as part of a seminal retrospective, spanning everything from the creative studies in colour and pattern she produced while studying at the German school, her commercial and function-led creations and her art-focused small-scale ‘pictorial weavings'.

Annie Fleischmann joined the Bauhaus school in 1922, and went on to marry her teacher Josef Albers in 1925, shortly after her arrival in Weimar. Both went on to become leading pioneers in 20th-century modernism, and the duo are renowned for their output in painting, colour theory, textile design and weaving. Josef published his artist’s handbook Interaction of Color in 1963, and Anni released her seminal text On Weaving in 1965. 

A collaborative spirit was at the centre of the Bauhaus philosophy, and it’s particularly pertinent that this spirit of partnership has continued after the Albers’ death, in the form of capsule collections between fashion designers and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

‘In many instances, Anni has left us a perfect road map for creating new objects, from rugs, to blankets, to wallpaper and upholstery materials,' Weber says. ‘I have also noticed that designers are drawn to the order and precision of Josef’s work, as well as to his use of colour.’

Here, we discover what draws Hermès, Paul Smith and Roksanda to the work of the two modernist masters…

Hermès

‘Albers’ principle was a simple one: to create a series of infinite chromatic variations within an unchanging form: the square, composed in a certain way,’ says Hermès’ artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas. In the Parisian maison’s 2008 collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Dumas and women’s universe creative director Bali Barret, travelled to its home in Bethany, Connecticut, to view pieces in Josef’s ‘Homage to the Square’ series.

What resulted was a series of tonal silk scarves – the first in Hermès’ ‘Editeur’ series, which has also seen collaborations with Daniel Buren, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Julio Le Parc – evoking the square variations of colour in Albers’ artworks. ‘They took us to the limits of our savoir-faire,’ Dumas adds. ‘The technique is “frame” printing, but at its most challenging, involving the feat known as “edge to edge,” in which large swathes of colour have to be printed on the silks, so that they touch each other but do not overlap.’

Paul Smith

‘Following a bad cycling accident, I started hanging out in a local pub, in Nottingham, meeting up with students from the local art college when I was there. They told me about this thing called “Bauhaus” and at first I thought it was a council estate but I soon learnt otherwise!’ laughs Paul Smith. ‘It was during one of those conversations that I first heard mention of Anni and became aware of her work.’

In celebration of the Tate Modern’s recently opened Albers retrospective, Smith has designed a men’s and women’s Scottish cashmere jumper, scarf and blanket inspired by a colourful and graphic and untitled wallhanging from 1925. Smith’s A/W 2015 collection – which featured garments panelled in graphic squares of colour, also nods to the tonal gradation in Josef and Anni Albers’ work – took its cues from the couple's research trips to Mexico.

‘I’m most inspired by Anni’s very experimental and pioneering approach to using unexpected materials and fibres,' Smith says. ‘She’d weave a piece of plastic or rayon in the most unlikely of places. She was a true visionary.'

Roksanda

‘Josef Albers really showed how different colours can look completely different in various combinations,’ says Roksanda Ilinčić, who collaborated with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2013, on an eight-piece capsule collection, which also celebrated the opening of her Mount Street boutique in London. The designer is renowned for her prowess and agility with colour, and this offering of dresses and separates, was colour-blocked into distinct panels. The pieces looked to the colour theory of Josef Albers’ ‘Homage to the Square’ series, and nodded to particular works like the Homage to the Square (La Tehuana) (1951) and Homage to the Square (1965).

Anni Albers’ work permeates her aesthetic. ‘I’ve also always been drawn to her status as a woman within Bauhaus. Women were expected to work on weaving and tapestry, but she tore up the perception that applied arts categories can’t be worthy of our admiration or high status. Josef and Anni are people that I come back to again and again.’

INFORMATION

‘Anni Albers’ is on view until 27 January 2019. For more information visit the Tate Modern website; Albers Foundation website, Hermès website, Paul Smith website, Roksanda website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG

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‘Where do the creative spheres of the technician and the artist meet?’ asked Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in 1926. For artist, teacher and textile pioneer Anni Albers, the meeting point was a weaving loom – a humble tool that she would transform into a vehicle of innovation.

Anticipating 100 years since the founding of the Bauhaus, Tate Modern is hosting Albers’ first major UK retrospective, following an extensive exhibition at the K20 museum in Düsseldorf. Tracing a production line of 350 studies, wall hangings, jewellery and prints, and reinforced by Albers’ seminal books, On Designing and On Weaving, the exhibition provides a rounded chronology of the methodology and research of perhaps the most influential textile designer of the 20th century.

The Bauhaus was a manifesto made flesh, a creative powerhouse disbanded by Nazis before it could reach full force. For Hitler, it was the Jewish threat incarnate; for those who attended, it promised a new, liberal mode of education. Having joined in 1922, Albers soon became intrinsic to the rationalist, functionalist Bauhaus, and the Bauhaus in turn became a work of living art.

Shortly after arriving as a student on the Weimar campus, Anni Fleischmann (as she was then known), married her teacher, Josef Albers, drawn by their mutual devotion to abstraction. The young couple relocated to the Dessau campus in 1926; Josef began his post as junior master and Anni began giving warmth to the often sterile architecture of modernism.

Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937

Although gender policy at the Bauhaus was supposedly egalitarian, women were still spurned from certain disciplines; Albers sacrificed painting (her first love) and fell into weaving by default. ‘The rule was, women were weavers,’ explains Torsten Blume, research associate at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. ‘Women were seen as soft and too weak for serious thinking. The strange thing is, weaving was the most intellectually challenging workshop at the Bauhaus.’

Albers reveled in the flexibility, complexity and unforgiving rigidity of the loom, refining her distinctive ‘pictorial weaves’ in the workshop she first described as ‘rather sissy’ but would come to lead. ‘Circumstances held me to threads and they won me over,’ she wrote, decades later.

In 1933, the Albers fled Germany to America, travelling to Mexico, Cuba, Chile and Peru. Anni became enthralled with ancient South American weaving techniques, tying historical ‘craft’ weaving with the vocabulary of modern art, then spinning both into architecture.

In her own words, Albers’ textiles ‘find a form for themselves... not to be walked on, only to be looked at.’ But her work did find function, as free-hanging room dividers and acoustic implements. Six Prayers, a meditative six-panel Holocaust memorial woven in cotton linen, raffia and stiff metal yarn, was an especially powerful example of an art form she revolutionised.

With Verticals, 1946, by Anni Albers, red cotton and linen. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Photography: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art

Albers relentlessly toyed with materials including horsehair, silk, chenille, cotton, jute and even cellophane, which lent iridescence to her work. ‘She articulates the way handweaving can become a laboratory,’ says art historian Briony Fer, who curated the exhibition at Tate.

The artist’s looms are presented here as an extension of her body and weaving as a discipline demanding rhythm, foresight and sensitivity to material. ‘Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that, which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials,’ Albers said.

Albers continues to influence a thread of contemporary creatives including fibre artist, Sheila Hicks – who studied under both Anni and Josef – and fashion designer Paul Smith, who is currently crafting a limited-edition line of Albers-infused knitwear.

The exhibition is not only a merited celebration of the artist’s work, but also an argument against the spurious division between art and craft. ‘Galleries and museums didn’t show textiles, that was always considered craft and not art. When it’s on paper it’s art,’ Albers remarked in 1984. Fatefully, it was only thanks to prints produced in her latter years that the artist ultimately gained the recognition her weaves were so long denied.

INFORMATION

‘Anni Albers’ is on view at Tate Modern from 11 October 2018 – 27 January 2019. Organised by Tate Modern and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. For more information, visit the Tate website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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San Francisco and Tel Aviv-based architecture and design studio Axelrod has renovated an apartment in the 1934 Zamenhof Clinic building in Tel Aviv. The former medical building designed in Bauhaus-style, like many of the buildings in the neighbourhood, underwent a transformation into a residential complex with much of the original interior architecture retained.

Axelrod’s job was to bring definition and domesticity to the 200 sq m, irregularly shaped shell. Principal architect Irit Axelrod led the design, choosing to embrace original features of the building such as the rough concrete ceiling that was left exposed, as well as a heavy structural pillar and the electricity and air-con ducts.

Balancing this preservation of the architecture’s commercial character, careful attention was paid to the remaining surfaces across the apartment. Herringbone oak flooring by Dilegno brought warmth, stain-painted concrete walls brought a softer more finished texture, while glass, custom cabinetry and black steel partitions developed the identity of the space.

A free-standing container with a black steel patina finish that floats in the middle of the open plan space solved the practicalities of the design. It hides an en suite bathroom, guest bathroom and powder room, storage and a laundry room. Meanwhile, its exterior hosts a bespoke shelving system for the display of the client’s books and art, and tucked into the container’s fourth side is a neat office desk.

Across the whole loft, clever use of lighting shapes the space, creating a continuous aesthetic through wiring, fixed lights and over-sized lamps by ViaBizzuno and David Groppi.

The master and guest bedrooms are located on the other side of the container, separated by a custom-made two-sided wardrobe above which a glass wall extends to the ceiling to create a light partition, that adds to the spacious aesthetic of the loft. Sliding doors neatly extend from the wardrobes, to close off the bedrooms for privacy when required.

Stainless steel DaDa kitchen islands and aluminium grey cabinets reflect light across the space while continuing the industrial look. In the heart of the space around which daily life revolves, Eames dining chairs, a Vitra lounge chair and sofa by Living Divani further set the Bauhaus scene.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Axelrod website

Anni Albers’ career spanned two continents, eight decades and half a dozen honorary doctorates. It negotiated personal commissions and worldwide mass-production; bridging the canvas, the loom and the printing press. To stack such a mountain of boundary-crossing achievements, takes a figure of ‘remarkable tenacity and adaptability’, says Manuel Cirauqui, the curator of the Albers retrospective recently opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

‘When she arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, Albers wanted to be a painter, but she was given a spot in the weaving workshop,’ Cirauqui explains. ‘She took it, and ran with it. Then, when forced to move to the US in 1933, she hit the big-time in America’s mass-produced design industry. At 60 years of age, when she had to stop weaving, she adapted again as a great theorist and philosopher.’

‘Touching Vision’ highlights Albers’ lifelong artistic ambidexterity, through a catalogue of examples taken from each of her ‘phases’. Linearly presented, and guided by Cirauqui’s steady hand, we see the queen of weaving’s singular modernist vision unfold across discipline, decade and timezone. The first work we confront, her Bauhaus thesis subject, is laid on top of a glass vitrine, so its textural complexity can ‘rise to the fore’, says Cirauqui, his hand hovering over the threads. Woven in, lustrous cellophane warps across haggard horsehair.

We see a commitment to material experimentation recur in her art jewellery. Defying its luxe appearance, and the source of several double-takes, Necklace (circa 1940) is made from a drain-strainer that gathers a cluster of stretched-out paper clips. Through such pieces Albers was attempting to bring beautifully made, timeless accessories to the masses, through the use of ‘common materials’ that were ‘uncommon to jewellery’.

The Bauhaus-inspired ideology of ‘art for everyone’ permeated Albers’ career, and later informed her mass-produced pattern work, which took off in 1951 when Florence Knoll invited her to collaborate with the Knoll textiles department, leading to a 30-year friendship, through which Albers would bring her stylistic innovation to the textile heavyweight. ‘The collaboration came at a time when everyone had badly reproduced Van Goghs in their living rooms,’ says Cirauqui. ‘Albers thought they should instead have access to high quality reproduced art. She thought textiles was the way to do it.’

The idea reached a zenith in 1976, with Albers’ best known pattern, Eclat, which started life as affordable print-upholstery, before reaching the much-copied global status it has today. For ‘Touching Vision’, Cirauqui lined the back wall of the Guggenheim with great swathes of original Knoll fabrics, allowing them to ripple as visitors pass close by; their hypnotically oscillating patterns waving. Positioned directly opposite, like a reflection, Cirauqui placed Albers’ painstaking pencil sketches of the pattern, so as to show the thinking behind the work. We see how the lines of the pattern interweave, warp and weft, like threads.

At 60, Albers no longer wished to handle the considerable physical demands of the loom, and despite living for a further 30 years, she made a conscious decision to stop weaving, ‘showing an incredible self-awareness and sensitivity’, says Cirauqui. The final work Epitaph (1968), in which you can read ‘a lot of her past, present and future’, is a magnum opus where we follow the story of a tangled golden thread, weaving a complex path through a taut, opaque back plate. ‘She created it knowing she would never be able to make such a vast, all-encompassing loom-based work again.’ It’s a physical representation of her weaving philosophy, embracing both technicality and expression.

Contextualised by pages from her sketchbook, and early examples of the Pre-Columbian textiles that inspired her, this is a show that reaches through the loom, and attempts to unspool the goings-on of her mind.

INFORMATION

‘Touching Vision’ is on view until 14 January 2018. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb
48009 Bilbao Bizkaia

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The Mexico-based architect and designer Michael Van Beuren might not be the household name he once was, but his creative legacy is about to be shot back into the spotlight, thanks to the revival of his designs by the furniture label Luteca.

The New York-based company, which has championed both contemporary and modernist Mexican design since its establishment in 2015, is responsible for bringing back some of Van Beuren’s most iconic works, which have not been produced in over 50 years.

Van Beuren (1911–2004) was born in New York and studied architecture at the Bauhaus under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Josef Albers until its closure in 1933. He moved to Acapulco at the end of 1936, where he oversaw the interiors of the bungalows at the renowned Flamingo Hotel in 1937, and quickly became a formative member of the Mexican Modernism movement.

By 1938, Van Beuren began focusing on furniture design, working with a fellow Bauhaus colleague, Klaus Grabe, to create modern and affordable pieces. Inspired by the local culture and craftsmanship, the duo applied Bauhaus design principles to popular Mexican mainstays, such as woven reclining chaises and wooden dining chairs. Their approach was a success; the pair was one of the winners of a 1941 competition organised by MoMA targeting teams from Latin America called ‘Organic Design for Home Furnishings’, which catapulted them to wide regard. 

In the following years, Van Beuren founded his furniture label Domus, which became synonymous with well-crafted, modernist design that garnered fans both in Mexico and America. Along with his own designs, Domus also produced work by Clara Porset, a friend and contemporary of Van Beuren’s. However, by 1951, the company’s move towards more mass manufacturing meant that Van Beuren’s earlier designs were no longer being produced.

Luteca’s Van Beuren collection is a true retelling of each design’s original charm. With the aid of the late designer’s grandson, Mike Van Beuren, original hand drawings from the 1940s were transferred into CAD files for contemporary production. Some samples were also shipped from the late designer’s home in Cuernavaca, Mexico to New York, so that precise measurements could be recorded.

Luteca’s offering is made up of several impressive pieces: Van Beuren’s ‘Miguelito’ series, that includes a bar stool, lounge chair and dining chair all featuring ribbed seats; the ‘Alcarán’ chaise, based on the designer’s winning design for MoMA; the ‘San Miguel’ chair (also a riff on the Mexican butaque seating); and the ‘Line’ lounge chair and sofa, which embody the Bauhaus roots and mid-century flair that runs through the designer’s work. In Luteca’s hands, each piece has been updated with elegant materials and contemporary details, such as brass pivots and powder-coated rods. 

INFORMATION

Luteca’s Michael Van Beuren collection is now available. For more details, please visit the Luteca website

Photography: Stephen Kent Johnson. Production: Michael Reynolds

In Tel Aviv’s White City, a blanket of Bauhaus buildings unrolls across the neighbourhood like a pure, geometric, architectural picnic. And now, Richard Meier & Partners has added a sleek new addition to the UNESCO World Heritage Site – the practice’s first international residential tower and first project in Israel.

From the 1930s, the area was populated with white modernist blocks, designed by German Jewish architects who had escaped Germany during the Nazi occupation and settled in Israel. Meier’s new building was designed with this specific urban context in mind: ‘The design of the buildings in the White City made a deep impression on me when I visited Israel many years ago,’ Meier explains. ‘So to work in this context has been an aspiration of mine for a long time.’ 

Following Bauhaus design principles, the concrete building has a modular rectilinear emphasis, with a glazed façade layered with an aluminium gridded louvered screen. Described as a ‘veil’, the screen provides a graceful layer of protection to the apartments, a concept that was inspired by traditional Middle Eastern clothing.

Sitting at the prominent intersection of Rothschild Boulevard and Allenby Street, the 154m high tower – with 42 levels above ground – brings a new sense of scale to the low- to mid-rise district, but the colour and lightness of the louvered façade allow a cordial conversation with the neighbouring buildings. At street level, retail spaces are left open and transparent to reduce the upper mass of the tower, which rests on slim piloti.

With service space at the core of the building, large window frames at the outer perimeter of the volume prioritise light and views into the open-plan apartments where the sliding louver blinds can be adjusted, forming a privacy buffer to the city.

‘It is my hope that inviting the timeless quality of this city’s light and views into an open layout for the residences, a design we haven’t seen much here, will bring together the existing elements with a fresh perspective,’ says Meier.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Richard Meier & Partners website

Appearing like simple line drawings that have sprung from the page, the bent steel tube sculptures of German artist Erika Hock possess almost life-like qualities. Arranged across Antwerp’s Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, each sculpture strikes a pose; while one stretches out a leg, another leans nonchalantly against a wall, each one interacting with the space in a different way.

The sculptures, which are being showcased at the gallery as part of Hock’s new solo exhibition ‘The Phantom Table’, are the latest works from the German artist’s ongoing ‘Elbows and Knees’ series - a body of work that blurs the line between functional objects and autonomous sculptures.

For inspiration for her ‘Elbows and Knees’ pieces, Hock looked to the slender frame and suspended seat of the Bauhaus cantilever chair; a concept that was developed in the 1920s. At the time, several architects including Mart Stam, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe were all working on designs for a chair without back legs and a form that would elegantly trace the line of the seated human body.

‘I have been interested in the cantilever chair for a while because of the way that its posture mimics the human body,’ explains the artist. ‘I think of a chair with four legs as being more of a support structure for the body. The cantilever chair not only supports the body but it becomes a body; so you can easily picture it standing up and stretching out.’

Each piece, powder coated in either a muted pink, canary yellow, black or white, takes the form of deconstructed item of furniture – a lamp, a chair and a coatrack – all placed directly on the gallery floor as if ready to be used. However, their use is ambiguous – the chair has no seat, the coatrack has no obvious rail, the lamp rises awkwardly from the floor – Hock has pushed the forms so far into the realms of sculpture that they cease to be functional.

‘These structures can be seen as investigations on functionality and abstractions of the human body and its curiosities,’ says Hock. ‘The varieties of human bodies and characteristics like noses, legs, eyes, etc are very interesting to me due to their non-translatability. We can only talk about diversities after thinking about conformity.’

INFORMATION

'Erika Hock: The Phantom Table' is on view until 18 February. For more information, visit the Gallery Sofie Van de Velde website

ADDRESS

Gallery Sofie Van de Velde
Lange Leemstraat
262 2018 Antwerp

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Tourists and locals alike will delight in a new map which tracks Berlin’s modernist architecture across the city. Published by Blue Crow Media in collaboration with journalist and film-maker Matthew Tempest and photographer Simon Phipps, the map shines a light on 50 modernist masterpieces of the 20th century, exhuming Berlin’s political history along the way.

The neat, double-sided guide includes an introduction to the period alongside details of the architectural edifices which defined it. Formerly a political correspondent for The Guardian, Tempest credits the architecture of a city to understanding its history. ‘No 20th century city has more ghosts than Berlin – and they live on in its buildings,’ he says.

London-based publisher Blue Crow Media illustrates Berlin's 20th century architectural styles across this neat folded map

From Bruno Taut’s Horseshoe Estate – influenced by Soviet ideals – to Cold War period works such as Café Moscow and Kino International in East Berlin, and onto Hans Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic and Le Corbusier’s Unité d'Habitation in West Berlin, the city’s architecture was stretched in every stylistic direction as political extremes tore the city in two.

Looking to the end of the century, post-modernist buildings such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe help us understand the role of memorial and repentance that architecture plays in Berlin – preventing us from forgetting irreversible mistakes, asking for forgiveness and commemorating lives lost, while issuing a monumental warning to future generations. ‘Its rebirth as the continent’s capital of cool comes with a blood-soaked and fractured past,’ says Tempest.

Berlin's iconic Television Tower, constructed between 1965 and 1969 by the administration of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)

Illustrated with striking photographs by Phipps, the Modern Berlin Map waits to be unfolded across a café table in Kreuzberg, to reveal new layers of historical understanding and further fuel our fascination with architectural artifice. The map can be purchased at independent bookshops across Europe including Pro qm in Berlin and Foyles in London.

INFORMATION

Modern Berlin Map, £8. For more information, visit the Blue Crow Media website

If we can count on anyone to wow us with spectacle it's British artist Alex Hartley. From the Arctic to outer space, it seems he has created everything, everywhere; testing the parameters of what gallerists, art and his body can do. For Hypothermia (2012) a three-hour looped single-channel video records Hartley's core body temperature dropping below 35℃. His Nowhereland project (also 2012) paraded an iceberg around London for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, before smashing it into pieces and sending bits into orbit. In 2003, Hartley scrambled over Los Angeles architecture for his LA Climbs book, risking life and limb to describe aerial routes of the city.

With the rest of his oeuvre in mind, creating a Bauhaus-inspired ruin outside Victoria Miro's central London gallery is just another day in the office for Hartley. But for visitors, there's no denying the new installation's drama. Hartley firmly believes that there's beauty in decay – after exploring this collapsed modernist folly we're converts to the cause of decadence.

'The way the art market works now, either you have no exhibition at all and go straight to sale, or the exhibition has to be something truly special,' Hartley says of the reasons behind his foray into follies. 'The most established galleries are being challenged by artists to create more and more ambitious installations and artistic experiences.' This builds a sense of intrigue around the artist – which will ultimately boost sales anyway. At least that's the thinking.

Victoria Miro, which has represented Hartley since 2003, celebrates this ambitious vision, and was more than up for this challenge. 'The gallery team helped to develop the garden,' Hartley explains. 'It's a very restricted site, and previously there were weeping willows. Now it has gone full Thunderbirds, like Tracy Island.'

The structure bears all the symbols of an abandoned modernist masterpiece – whitewashed walls, wide, functional windows and an asymmetric footprint – or as Hartley modestly phrases it, 'a horizontal roof and a few cantilevers here and there'. When looking at it, (and look is all you can do – wading through the swamped garden is sensibly prohibited), it's easy to feel transported to another world; or at least, a forgotten part of this one. There's a Daniel Arsham-esque post-apocalyptic feel to the installation, as if we're in the future, looking back on a terrible tragedy that has befallen today. Indeed, Hartley cites JG Ballard's dystopian novels as key inspirations. 'I wanted the installation to have a timeless quality – It could be a modernist ruin, or a Victorian folly.'

Timeless it may feel, but there's a restricted future for this work. Hartley is keen to for A Gentle Collapsing II to remain site-specific, which rules out the chance of it being bought (and therefore salvaged) on the spot. However, with more ruins planned, it would be possible for Hartley to recreate the installation elsewhere, upon request. Either way, this particular version will have to be dismantled come 16 December, to give Victoria Miro its garden back.

The rest of the exhibition is more traditional in layout, and the works will last longer than their month-long display period. Photographs taken as if 'kneeling in the undergrowth' record hidden jungle scenes. The images – neatly framed, sparsely positioned – only serve to exaggerate the exotic wildness of the outside tableau, with their clean, almost sterile minimalism. Hartley describes this multifaceted, immersive exhibition as 'the most theatrical' he has ever made, which is saying something, coming from the man who sent fragments of an iceberg into orbit.

INFORMATION

’Alex Hartley: After You Left’ is on view until 16 December. For more information, visit the Victoria Miro website

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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