Customer Reviews

Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is very insightful, because it helps us question something that is so often taken for granted: the shape of buildings around us. It is a fast read at only 120 pages, but touches on several big ideas about the influence of architecture on individuals as well as countries and history. My amateur interest in architecture is spurred to further investigation after reading this informative and provocative book.

I'm giving it 5 stars for the readability and "a-ha" spark of realization factor. The book is not without its flaws, as it is clearly based on a series of lectures, so suffers from the typical continuity/context issues that stricter editing could have cured. Originally addressed to people familiar with modern architecural history and Ivy League colleges of the United States, some of the unexplained references earlier in the book are eventually resolved in later chapters. One other criticism is that so much of the book seems to be an "ad hominum" attack on Gropius, even going so far as to psycho-analyze several events in rather symbolic detail.

. . .in E. Michael Jones' frontal assult on modernism!

In "Degenerate Moderns", Jones reveals how much of modern society was brought about by persons whose personal lives (and beliefs) could best be described as deviant. In "Dionysos Rising", he addresses certain trends in music which somewhat less success. In this volume, he takes on Walter Gropius and the Balhaus School of Design. The style is quite different from the previous two books and reads almost like a novel. In the book we learn how Gropius' own beliefs about sex, family, and religion (and his, shall we say, deviancies in these areas of life) influenced his architectural work.

A devastating critique of the International school of architecture in general, and Walter Gropius' work in particular.

I was fascinated by this incredibly revealing book.
E. Michael Jones is the author of other works
that "search and destroy" (in a manner of speaking)
the corrupt social and political views of many purveyors
of modern art forms, showing how they not only
result in (further!) lowered standards of moral
conduct, but also reflect the apostasy and debauchery
that are so often a staple in the lives of the men
who produce it. Here he takes on Walter Gropius
and his Bauhaus architectural movement of the
early 20th century. I love the way Jones has
structured it, to read swiftly, almost like a novel,
by how he continues to shift back and forth
between the time of Gropius' activity, and then
the modern day exigencies surrounding the hapless
victims (from Chicago to Poland) who have to actually
DWELL in these monstrosities
that were once considered so fashionable and chic.
Jones has cut right to the heart of the issue, by
revealing clearly how the static and cold style

of the buildings these avant garde architects promoted,
reflects perfectly the debased sexual morass
that Gropius and many of his colleagues
(Mies van der Rohe) found themselves
swallowed up in. I went to an arts academy when I was
younger, and had to read about the Bauhaus
and Gropius' work. I knew it was horrible
at the time, but couldn't articulate my views.
Now I can, thanks to Mr. Jones' book.
It should be read by everyone with the guts to
look modernism in its blackened eye and see it for
the moral bankruptcy it represents.

Bauhaus architecture can be seen in houses that have flat roofs, non load-bearing walls, and are raised above the earth. The nature of Bauhaus architecture is that of modern man: designed to be functional and nothing else. Not only in homes but in apartments as well. Bauhaus represents virtually every condominium, high-rise apartment, and college dorm in the world (is it any wonder that college dorm life is virtually synonymous with sexual orgy?).

Bauhaus architecture was the invention of Walter Gropius after the first world war. The goal of Bauhaus architecture is to design a building where man's ties to the ground and family are severed but at the same time he lives in close proximity with other people while never developing ties to these people (this is necessary for sexual liberation; p. 84). The college dorm gives one enough privacy for sexual escapades but enough proximity to other people to make the act possible. Dorms are simply cubes stacked one upon another. There is no soul there, nor can there be.

Bauhaus architecture is not merely meant to destroy the family, but to propogate an entirely new social order. It was to represent politics by design, or state socialism (107). The anti-Christian nature of Bauhaus is evident in the flat roof: a flat roof by definition is an imposition of ideology upon a reality (e.g., it will leak). But more importantly, a flat roof represents modern man's negation of God, and without God there is no future (102).

The alternative to Bauhaus, which Jones does not develop, is in the rich moral vision given us by Christianity. The Gothic cathedral, the meditarranean villa, and the Byzantium dome all represent a God who is not only truth and goodness, but beauty himself. The solution, Jones notes, is to go back to the fork in the road where we made the wrong turn and fix it (67).