Customer Reviews

The New Architecture and The Bauhaus

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

 

 

I've found great substance with your book, "The New Architecture and the Bauhaus". It was brilliant and very informative. I was fascinated by the analysis of 20th Century Modern architecture and the history of its development. I recommend this book highly for anyone interested in modern design, or the courage of the indomitable human spirit. Gropius fought against mediocrity, mindless repetition and the numbing Status Quo. This book deserves to be read.

In one of my graphic design classes, we studied Bauhaus design. I was fascinated by Walter Gropius' designs and decided to do a report on him (if you can ever visit his house in MA, you will be awed to see his theories put into practice!). When I found and read this book in my college library I knew I had to buy it. It was out of print when I ordered it, but worth the wait. This book is a must read for all architecture/art history/graphic design students.

Just knowing that everything in this book came directly from Gropius hand is fascinating. It's a look into an aspect of design/architecture that biographies and history books just can't give you.

What is design? This question is answered in tens of ways today, pointing [maybe] to a paradigm shift in the profession. In this scenarium, I rather stick to the definition that broght the term into life, when the idea captivated the world. Gropius view is still the strongest we have, is the one that created this profession.

I think the profession took many paths after the dissolution of the Bauhaus and lots of them are misunderstandings that live the designer in a bad position. Gropius and the Bauhaus professors begun with a quest of understanding what in art can be objective knowledge and they did a lot of work in this direction, but by reading the book you'll see that that's just one of the positions that build the importance of the bauhaus. The "designer knowledge" is something very delicate (that Gropius understood very well) and has been interpreted in bilions of ways by schools and institutes of today. Yes, Gopius and the Bauhaus was trying to "scientifisize" design, but with the solid knowledge that art cannot be taught, that creativity comes from personality and so on. The complete project of the Bauhaus was the beauty of it.

To see how this idea of a professional called product designer gathering industrial, artistic and crafts skills was conceived is the triumph that makes this book [to me] the ultimate guide!