Bauhaus and Viridian Design
Within his Design Speech, an inaugurating gesture for the Viridian movement, Sterling jumps from the beginning of the 21st century to the dawn of the 20th for comparison. I’m not sure whether this skip occurs because the reference to the Belle Epoque is simple, or whether the bypass is the result of a belief that there was too much misalignment between Viridian and the design movements of the 20th century. By making this leap, Sterling appears to consciously ignore the Bauhaus, one of the most influential design movements of the previous hundred years. There are theoretical differences between the two movements, but a closer look at fundamental documents from both reveals that there are significant similarities as well.
Placing Viridian in dialogue with the Bauhaus potentially helps to contextualize Sterling’s movement within a more nuanced continuum than the one he proposes by referencing the Belle Epoque. Leah Dickerman wrote in Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity that the Bauhaus — as Sterling aspired for Viridian — was a “kind of cultural think tank for its times.” The comparisons and contrasts that I present below are only a small segment of the dialogue that could happen between the two. But, as the Bauhaus was a legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement, a reference that Sterling notes as key to his alignment with the Belle Epoque, I argue that even these limited notes place the Viridian movement within the Bauhaus’ own legacy, whether that was Sterling’s intent or not.
Similar to Viridian, the Bauhaus intended to harness design to change, rather than simply reflect, the conditions of the world within which it was practiced. It was founded as a school in 1919, disbanded in Germany in 1933, and then distributed its theories through the emigration of school leaders and former professors to multiple American institutions. The Bauhaus could theoretically be defined as a school, but an equivalent gesture could limit the definition of Viridian to a mailing list. Both were multifaceted movements who unequivocally wanted to be of their time, and both believed in declaring that intent through manifestos.
In 2000, in the Viridian Design Principles, Sterling wrote:
The future is not a stage set. The past is not a sacred myth. The past and the future are this place at a different time. The future is advancing upon you, and the past retreating, at a remorseless rate of one second per second. You can seek understanding anywhere, but you can only act in the moment. “You Own Modernity.” It’s easy to get transfixed by romantic ideas of historical inevitability: glamorous marches of progress, or gruesome congenital declines. But your own epoch is your own problem. If you call yourself “post” or “former,” or “neo” or “retro,” you are begging for someone else’s troubles.
In his 1923 Working theses, Mies van der Rohe (legendary architect and 3rd head of the Bauhaus) wrote this:
Not yesterday, not tomorrow, only today can be given form.
Only this architecture creates.
Create form out of the nature of the task with the means of our time.
This is our work.
It’s possible that Sterling skips the whole of the 20th century, and the design movements that were a part of it, because of the output and influence of men such as van der Rohe. Sterling may have skipped the 20th century in reaction to the feelings of gross mass production and inhumanity 20th century production can evoke. When thinking of Modernism, a movement with which van der Rohe is inextricably linked, who doesn’t equate the era with the brutality of glass, concrete, and steel? The permanence of those materials is antithetical to the intention of Sterling’s movement’s qualities. According to the Viridian design principles, “The Viridian principle of ‘Planned Evanescence’… demand[s] that the product and all its physical traces should gracefully disintegrate and vanish entirely.”
In contrast, the 20th century left us with ruin porn.
However, the origination of those forms began most distinctly within the halls of the Bauhaus, and some of the intentions of the Bauhaus weren’t far from Sterling’s own. In the Viridian Design Principles, Sterling writes:
The boundaries that separate art, science, medicine, literature, computation, engineering, and design and craft generally are not divinely ordained. The most galling of these boundaries are socially generated entities meant to protect the power-interests of knowledge guilds. This is not to say that that all research techniques are identical, or that their results are all equally valid under all circumstances: quantum physics isn’t opera. But there exists a sensibility that can serenely ignore intellectual turf war, and comprehend both physics and opera… If you choose, you can step outside the boundaries history makes for you. You can walk through walls.
In his 1919 Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimer founding manifesto, 1st leader of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius writes that the “Aims of the Bauhaus” are this:
The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art — sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and the crafts — as inseparable components of a new architecture… These men, of kindred spirit, will know how to design buildings harmoniously in their entirety — structure, finishing, ornamentation, and furnishing.
Oskar Schlemmer, in the 1923 Manifesto for the first Bauhaus exhibition, took the articulation a step further — to (in a retrospective nod to Sterling’s principle) reach beyond simply the world of art in design.
An idealism of activity that embraces, penetrates, and unites art, science, and technology and that influences research, study, and work will construct the ‘art-edifice’ of Man, which is but an allegory of the cosmic system. Today we can do no more than ponder the total plan, lay the foundations, and prepare the building stones.
The Bauhaus’s cross-pollination regime, though by no means without its fraught moments, created innovations within imaging, materials, and production. Their tactics were theoretically different — Sterling states that he isn’t interested in the high quality for the masses ethos of the Bauhaus — but were their end goals really not the same?
In Teaching at the Bauhaus, Rainer K. Wick discussed the fundamental influence of the German Werkbund and one of its most prominent individuals, Hermann Muthesius, on Bauhaus pedagogy. Wick paraphrases Muthesius as saying, “that history is an irreversible process, and thus that in the wake of industrialization the machine had surpassed handwork once and for all, and that the engineer was increasingly taking the place of the artist. He was conscious not only of the necessity of machine production for society but also of the new aesthetic possibilities that the machine brought with it.”
This statement resonates well with the tactics described by Sterling in Viridian’s own design principles. Sterling proposes at least three principles specific to the new aesthetic possibilities of his time:
“Make the Invisible Visible”
Our primary advantage over previous generations of artists and graphic designers is that we can see much better than they could. We can manipulate, store, create and analyze graphic imagery with historically unprecedented ease and power. This trend should be recognized, advanced, and artistically exploited. Advances in instrumentation can be used to change the zeitgeist…
“Less Mass, More Data”
Physical resources should be replaced with information when possible. If you always know where something is, you don’t have to chain it up…
“Tangible Cyberspace”
The obverse of “Less Mass, More Data” is “Tangible Cyberspace,” introducing computer-generated artifacts and processes into the basic texture of the physical world. This transcends mere CAD-CAM, in that it seeks for a profound new interrelationship of the computational and the environmental…
At another, closely related point — well articulated within Wick’s reference to Muthesius, the Viridian movement and the Bauhaus misalign. In his 1902 book Style-Architecture and Building Art, Muthesius aims for an entirely different audience:
Today, no movement that seeks to be a reform movement can direct itself only to the production of luxury art; its goal, rather, must be to pursue an art suited to mid-class society, which defines the general character of our modern social contract.
Post-Muthesius, and in some part as a result of the designs, ethos, and dispersion of the practices of the Bauhaus, the 20th century saw the rise of the design of objects for popular consumption. Due to its own context of shifts in materials and production, the Bauhaus and its descendants believed in the importance of high quality design for the masses. By changing what people used on a daily basis, the design movement believed that it could change the way that people lived.
Sterling emphasizes a similar point, but — within his Viridian origination documents — he is interested in targeting an entirely different class. Sterling doesn’t want to create high quality, green designed objects for the masses. For Viridian, he writes in the manifesto, “Couture is on the agenda. We need a form of Green high fashion so appallingly seductive and glamorous that it can literally save people’s lives… We are attempting to survive by causing the wealthy and the bourgeoisie to willingly live in a new way.” He doesn’t care if high quality, sustainably-produced goods find their way to Target (the designer collections themselves a legacy of a Bauhaus ethos regarding design); Sterling, he claims, is only interested in couture.
It may be in regards to this fundamental concept that Viridian and the Bauhaus part ways. However, the conception and the realities of both are often not what they initially intend or seem they will be.
One of the Bauhaus legacy’s greatest historical challenges is the fact that it became shorthand for a larger Modernist movement that went far beyond the intention of its own, or — as Dickerson wrote — it became “overshadowed… by the many meanings given to it in later years.” Bauhaus became synonymous with far-reaching Modernist definitions that consumed the intricacies of the reality of the pedagogy and output of the school. What was Viridian’s legacy? This has been harder for me to find.
However, there is one clear progeny that I was able to trace that may stand in conflict with Sterling’s very non-Bauhausian predilection for the wealthy and couture. Research on Viridian led me to the organization Worldchanging. On the Worldchanging website, it says that the Viridian-affiliated organization was acquired by Architecture for Humanity. According to Worldchanging’s website, Worldchanging was merged with Architecture for Humanity’s “Open Architecture Network to create a robust and informed network to bring solutions to global challenges to life.” “By combining the two sites,” the site says, ”we can evolve into a robust center for applied innovation and sustainable development.”
At first glance, this sounds completely on message with Viridian’s original goals. A global network of designers will design our way towards a better world. However, Architecture for Humanity is an organization that promotes the creation of something other than elitist design couture. This is a tricky argument for me to make, since there’s nothing in Architecture for Humanity’s own, written self-definition that conflicts with what Sterling’s early writing mandates. However, it’s an organization that harnesses and supports designers to create structures for those who need it most — populations decimated by natural disasters, communities facing socio-economic challenges, places needing improvement — for clients who are anything but of the elite classes. Personally, I’ve perceived Architecture for Humanity in the spirit of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio’s Architecture of Decency, and, to an extent, as a legacy of the Bauhaus. If Architecture for Humanity isn’t enacting the theory that good design improves lives and that there should be high quality for the masses, then who is? I find this hard to reconcile with Sterling’s own predilection — or at least his founding documents’ expression — for the wealthy. Or maybe, despite his initial statement, a look back at some aligned founding principals shows that Viridian and one of the most influential design movements of the 20th century aren’t so entirely different; even the legacy of Viridian, not just the initial movement itself, could prove be the legacy of the Bauhaus after all.
