Walter Gropius: The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935/1965)

In this short book, first published one year after his emigration to England, Gropius presents the ideas of the Bauhaus, which had been closed and banned in Germany, to an Anglo-Saxon and American audience. The book contributed considerably to Gropius’ rise to a celebrated architect – particularly in the US – and introduced the Bauhaus to America. “When he came to Harvard in 1937, he did refer to the exemplary American building industry, which had no equal, but he also pointed out that he did not want to teach Americans what American architecture should look like, and that he most certainly did not want to introduce a European style. This was exactly what he attempted and finally did, of course, as he believed that architecture had to express the forces of the present time like the members of the Neues Bauen [New Building] with himself at their head had shown in the 1920s.” (Nerdinger). This volume, in which the architect looks back on his work in Weimar and Dessau, reveals the foundations of the self-confidence expressed here.

Translated by P. Morton Shand from the German manuscript entitled Die neue Architektur und das Bauhaus. Grundzüge und Entwicklung einer Konzeption
With an Introduction by Frank Pick
First published by Faber and Faber, London, 1935
Publisher The MIT Press, 1965
ISBN 0262570068
112 pages

Review: Herbert Read (Scrutiny, 1935)

PDF (4 MB, updated on 2019-9-13)

Ulrich Conrads (ed.): Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (1964/1970)

“The present volume offers eloquent testimony that many of the master builders of this century have held passionate convictions regarding the philosophic and social basis of their art. Nearly every important development in the modern architectural movement began with the proclamation of these convictions in the form of a program or manifesto. The most influential of these are collected here in chronological order from 1903 to 1963. Taken together, they constitute a subjective history of modern architecture; compared with one another, their great diversity of style reveals in many cases the basic differences of attitude and temperament that produced a corresponding divergence in architectural style.

In point of view, the book covers the aesthetic spectrum from right to left; from programs that rigidly generate designs down to the smallest detail to revolutionary manifestoes that call for anarchy in building form and town plan. The documents, placed in context by the editor, are also international in their range: among them are the seminal and prophetic statements of Henry van de Velde, Adolf Loos, and Bruno Taut from the early years of the century; Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1910 annunciation of Organic Architecture; Gropius’s original program for the Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919; “Towards a New Architecture, Guiding Principles” by Le Corbusier; the formulation by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner of the basic principles of Constructivism; and articles by R. Buckminster Fuller on universal architecture and the architect as world planner. Other pronouncements, some in flamboyant style, including those of Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Theo van Doesburg, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, and Louis I. Kahn. There are also a number of collective or group statements, issued in the name of movements such as CIAM, De Stijl, ABC, the Situationists, and GEAM.

Since the dramatic effectiveness of the manifesto form is usually heightened by brevity and conciseness, it has been possible to reproduce most of the documents in their entirety; only a few have been excerpted.”

First published as Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts by Verlag Ullstein, Frankfurt/M and Berlin, 1964.

Translated by Michael Bullock
Publisher MIT Press, 1970
ISBN 0262530309, 9780262530309
192 pages
via carlao126

PDF (4 MB)

See also Charles Jencks, Karl Kropf (eds.), Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, 1997.

Gennifer Weisenfeld: Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (2002)

“The radical Japanese art group Mavo roared into new arenas and new art forms during the 1920s, with work ranging from performance art to painting, book illustration, and architectural projects. Hurling rocks through glass roofs and displaying their rejected works, Mavo artists held peripatetic protest exhibitions against the Japanese art establishment. Ultimately, Mavo’s work became a major influence in Japanese commercial art and had a pronounced and lasting impact on Japanese visual and political culture. This abundantly illustrated volume, the first book-length study in English on Mavo, provides a critical evaluation of this often outrageous and iconoclastic movement, tracing Mavo’s relationship to broader developments in modernism worldwide.

Gennifer Weisenfeld provides a fascinating look into Japanese popular culture by showing how Mavo artists sought to transform Japanese art in response to the rise of industrialism. They deliberately created images that conveyed the feelings of crisis, peril, and uncertainty that were beginning to characterize daily life. Their art often alluded to mechanical environments through the use of abstracted imagery such as interconnected tubular forms and shapes reminiscent of riveted steel-plate girders. Looking in depth at the art itself, the flamboyant personalities of the artists, and the cultural and political history of Japan in this interwar period, Weisenfeld traces the strategies used by these artists as they sought to reintegrate art into daily experience.

Weisenfeld thoroughly documents the links between Mavo artists and a wide range of other artistic and political movements with which they associated themselves, such as futurism, dada, expressionism, socialism, and communism. Capturing the restlessness and iconoclastic fervor of Mavo, Weisenfeld is the first to fully locate this modern Japanese artistic community within the broader historical and intellectual framework of international art of the early twentieth century.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520223381, 9780520223387
368 pages

Reviews: Patricia Failing (caa.reviews), Alexandra Munroe (J Japanese Studies), J. Keith Vincent (J Asian Studies).

Publisher

PDF (95 MB, no OCR, updated on 2017-7-17)
multiple formats (Internet Archive, added on 2017-7-17)

See also Weisenfeld’s essay Mavo’s Conscious Constructivism: Art, Individualism, and Daily Life in Interwar Japan (1996, 10 pp) and
Hagiwara Kyōjirō’s Death Sentence (1925).