The Bauhaus Ideal: Then and Now
An Illustrated Guide to Modernist Design and Its Legacy
William Smock

Category: Art/Design
Format: Hardcover, 200pp, 6 x 9, 350 B&W Illus
ISBN: 0-89733-522-8
Price: $27.50

About the Book

The Bauhaus Ideal is an enormously readable history of modernist design, enhanced by the author's black and white drawings which both illustrate and elucidate the text. It is a book meant for the lay reader and examines its subject with the kind of wit and insight found in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) and Edward R. Tufte's Envisioning Information (1990). The Bauhaus Ideal is both a picturebook and a guidebook to the fascinating and enduring legacy of modernist design, and to the continuing influence of Bauhaus on interior design-not just in architecture, but also in furniture, glassware, tableware and kitchen utensils, the whole range of domestic arts. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames and others were part of a movement to make sense of design in the modern world. Their experiments––both successes and failures––eloquently demonstrate what design can accomplish. "Design" itself was an invention of the Bauhaus era to combine usefulness, beauty and economy into a reasonable whole. This unique volume introduces modern design principles and examines them from an historically critical perspective. It concludes with some ideas for melding modern solemnity with postmodern irony. And in each phase, the illustrations speak as eloquently as the text. This invaluable book is itself a work of art and is issued at a time when there is a revival of interest in modernism-furniture by Corbusier, Noguchi and Eames has never been more popular.

Reviews

"Smock energetically examines the legacy of the Bauhaus, a post-World War II German school of design founded by Walter Gropius to replace Victorian-era design with machine-age style. Citing embodiments of the famous dictums "form follows function," "truth to materials," and the linking commandment "less is more," Smock analyzes visual efficiency and modernism's appeal to reason, especially in architecture. He posits, however, that modern art stopped looking new in the 1970s, when architects sought more personal and fanciful forms of expression, becoming more showbiz in their orientation than aesthetic in their fusing of high and low culture. Smock concedes that the excesses of modernism include dogmatic solemnity, but he finds designers who rebound to be "flashy and ephemeral," and argues that their mannerist decor exerts its own tyranny. Highly politicized, amply illustrated with pencil sketches, and featuring a detailed annotated bibliography, Smock's short and lively book is long on controversy and ideas."––Booklist