Jugendstil and the Bauhaus

WR's canny observation that the comfortably stuffed chairs by Josef Hoffmann cost between $3,000 and $4,000, but were well worth it made me realize the greatest difference between my favorite style, Jugendstil, and the Bauhaus ethos which followed it. Gropius wanted blue collar people to be able to live in well-designed dwellings filled with well-designed furniture.

Marcel Breuer's epiphany that the chrome-plated handle bars on the bicycle that got him around in Weimar would make simple, springy chairs mass producible. The supreme irony of the Bauhaus in its phase one in Weimar is that the rinky dink Haus am Horn(1923) is the only Bauhausey structure left by the school, and that only because Gropius needed to have a place to display the 1923 international exhibition he felt was needed to hype publicity for his new school. The disastrous inflation precluded other structures.

On the other hand, Van de Velde's two glorious 1904 and 1911 Jugendstil buildings accrued to the Bauhaus because the Belgian had to leave Germany as an enemy alien.

They are now the showplaces of the Bauhaus Uni. Two young Munich architects have just repossessed a Van de Velde villa at Cranachstrasse 34 to recycle it as a six family community dwelling, exorcising its inglorious pasts as, first, the Russian military HQ and (especially) as the STASI main station in Weimar.

I love the Jugendstil in Weimar and elsewhere, but I respect Gropius' ambition to make blue collar life more esthetically rewarding.