" O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?"- From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) by Tom Wolfe "Perhaps the most eloquent and polemical of the recent public responses has been that of Tom Wolfe in his From Bauhaus to Our House, which opens with the wonderfully parodic American lament with which I began this section."- A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988) Linda Hutcheon For the next thirty years American architecture-of every sort-would be based on designs and concepts devised for German worker housing in the 1920s."- From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) by Tom Wolfe The course of American architecture changed overnight. When the Silver Prince himself, Walter Gropius, head of the Bauhaus, fled Germany and arrived at Harvard in the 1930s, he and many of his Bauhaus comrades were received like white gods come from the sky. The fact that the Bauhaus style developed out of the ruins of Germany after the First World War, in the name of socialism, and with the ideal of creating Perfect Worker Housing-i.e., in a setting that bore no resemblance to the United States-didn't matter in the slightest. The Colonial Complex was not confined to."The story so far: Always obedient colonials when it came to style, American architects were bowled over in the 1920s by the European avant-garde fashion of Bauhaus architecture.
The Bauhausians system of instruction and their very presence were responsible for most of the change. The Museum of Modern Art gave Gropius a show of his work and Philip Johnson, one of the authors of "The International Style," started from zero and learned from Gropius.Īmerican architecture was revolutionized in three years. Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which became the Chicago Institute of Design. Gropius was appointed the head of Harvard's architecture school and Breuer joined him. When Gropius arrived, he was received like a god and his followers like saints.
He would make his permanent home there, as did many of the other Bauhaus architects.
In 1937, Gropius came to the United States to escape the Nazis. Chapter III, The White Gods Summary and Analysis
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