In our contemporary society, everything seems hyper-efficient, and feelings of suffocation are common as we’ve reached a point where it feels as though you need technology to engage with society. These issues are reflected in the 20th century Frankfurt School of thought. In particular, the school’s Marxist theories, which address anxieties surrounding how culture and art fit into a newly industrialised society, demonstrate the increasing alienation from one’s own fruits of labour and, more importantly, alienation from ourselves and each other, which resulted from industrialisation.
These ideas are explored in Frankfurt School thinker Max Weber’s metaphor of the “Iron Cage,” which illustrates a state in which the more knowledge and technology we develop and rationalise into existence, the more humanity will find itself experiencing the curse in which it is expected to exploit this new state of “hyper-efficiency.” This gradually reduces people to numbers in a system, and, in the end, traps them in an “iron cage” of modernity.
However, was industrialisation truly as alienating as Weber suggests, or can we address these anxieties and use them for good? Bauhaus took on this challenge and sought to take on the class dynamics that had been created by the Industrial Revolution and flip it on its head, creating a classless utopia out of it.
After the First World War, Germany was in a state of disarray. Industrialisation had bubbled up complex feelings in that it had sped up technologies in developing weapons, while also making way for medical advancements (such as facial prosthetic masks). Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus with the idea of bridging the gap between fine artists and designers to work together in reconstructing a modern utopian society using these new technologies.
Bauhaus was influenced by Russian constructivism, where the machine used artistic techniques to build a functional society from scratch, and the idea of “Art for art’s sake” is rejected. In this setting, art was not a bourgeois leisure activity but a tool. Bauhaus took this idea, developing “International Style,” which broke down the expectation that design and style is contingent on culture, religion or class, instead fighting for an indistinguishable style, creating equality between all artists.
Bauhaus’ artists constructed these designs via new technology that, not long before, was being used to create weapons. Form becomes function, where fast paced mass produced materials and items could be incorporated into quotidian lives for the better, no matter your class or country. you belonged to. Industrial, cheap materials such as iron, glass and concrete were used in uniform, practical designs.
The influence that Bauhaus had on modern day society is seen everywhere, as its philosophy championed for an understanding of the materials at hand and how we can use them to achieve our intentions with design, whether that be in architecture, fashion or graphic design.
Bauhaus as a movement coincided with the emergence of the Frankfurt School. Although in different spheres, both movements attempted to understand a rapidly modernising society’s effects on culture, art, and politics that were prevalent all over Europe following the destruction caused by the First World War. Bauhaus tried to reclaim the power of the machine and use it for good. For all its utopian intentions, we can visualise Weber’s metaphor of the Iron Cage in many Bauhaus ideas: a construction stripped of identity, becoming, at the end of the day, just another glass-walled box.
Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash
