It’s a Bauhaus World; We’re Just Living in It
This Week in the OS Haus: 100 years of Bauhaus — with Sebastian Smee, Peter Chermayeff, Tamar Avisahi, Tom Wolfe and a visit to Walter Gropius’ house. Listen today at 2pm or anytime on our website.
It was a German art school that gave us the look of 20th century America— that austere, less-is-more, form-follows-function aesthetic that’s back in a big way nowadays thanks in part to Ikea and Mad Men.
There’s all kinds of celebrations around the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus. Around Boston The Harvard Art Museums is exhibiting design objects, photography, textiles, paintings and archival materials from its collection;the MFA has a print show, and the Harvard Film Archive has an upcoming series called Film By Design, featuring avant-garde Bauhausler filmmakers.
Our Bauhaus immersion began with a tour of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’ house in Lincoln, Mass, a half mile from Walden Pond.
In the end we thought that Tom Wolfe might have been more right than wrong in his famous critique of the Bauhauslers for their influence on 20th century architecture, but we came to learn that the movement was really about much more than architecture. You can dislike the Pan Am Building, the JFK Building in Boston or the Harvard Graduate Center and still embrace the Bauhaus idea.
Boston architect, designer, and imagineer Peter Chermayeff brought it home for us. A Bauhausler through and through, Peter spent weekends with the Gropius family while a student at Andover.
Bauhaus thinking at its best…for me was not about form or style. It was about values. It was about a social agenda and thinking afresh about the modern world, using materials and techniques of manufacturing as a new way of addressing needs of all kinds at every scale. It was also a marriage of disciplines, a way of bringing all kinds of people together to make a better capacity to live in urban complexity, especially artists and makers of things, bringing the corporate world and the artistic world and the intellectual world and all disciplines together. For me the best of the Bauhaus has to do with with a humanistic agenda carried out by intellects and artists working together. There was a sense of art playing a huge role together with all of the technology and the consumer world bringing it bringing things together in a new amalgam that had not existed before.
Peter’s story about how he and his partners came up with the transit design for the Boston MBTA illustrates the idea beautifully.
Our podfriend Tamar Avishai gave us a slice of Bauhaus visual art. Conor had the terrific idea to commission a Lonely Palette podcast episode to go with our show, and Tamar did a deep dive on a Kandinsky print in the MFA show. You can hear the full episode here.
Tamar pointed out that the google doodle on Friday was Bauhaus-inspired, surely in our honor.
We’re Reading: The Last Pass
We’re late in catching up with Gary Pomerantz’s terrific book, The Last Pass, about the Celtics’ dynasty era of Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and Red Auerbach, but Gary will be in town next week for the rehearsal of a theatrical performance connected to the book. In his 90’s now, Cooz talked at length with Pomerantz about his life and career and his regrets for not having understood the depth of the prejudice Russell faced as an African-American star in a city with a fraught racial history.
There’s loads to talk with Gary about, including this piece he shared with us: Privileged, by Utah Jazz Kyle Korver.
Coming Soon: Matt Aucoin run AMOC
Our friend and photographer par excellence Michael Lutch snapped this great shot at the BUR CitySpace Friday night, and engineer par excellence George Hicks recorded the conversation and the music with Matt and his AMOC Ensemble.
Links:
Isaac Chotiner’s combative interview with Bret Easton Ellis (and Andrea Long Chu’s brilliant and utterly eviscerating review of his book); Halle Butler’s new novel of millennial precarity (the narrator, according to Katie Bloom’s review, “has what anthropologist [and OS guest] David Graeber would call a ‘bullshit job’”), reviewed also by Jia Tolentino; Zionism and the left; if you’re ready to be truly gutted, a tragic and beautifully written excerpt from Jayson Green’s new memoir; Ivanka, profiled.
That’s all for this week. Like, tweet, subscribe, and consider donating to your favorite podcast/ radio hour.
❤ the os team
