From Bauhaus to Our House
First edition
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| Author | Tom Wolfe |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Art criticism |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
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Publication date
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1981 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 143 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 7734777 |
From Bauhaus to Our House is a 1981 narrative of Modern architecture, written by Tom Wolfe.
In 1975 Wolfe made his first foray into art criticism with The Painted Word, in which he argued that art theory had become too pervasive because the art world was controlled by a small elitist network of wealthy collectors, dealers and critics. Art critics were, in turn, highly critical of Wolfe's book, arguing that he was a philistine who knew nothing of what he wrote.
After The Painted Word, Wolfe published a collection of his essays, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976), and his history of the earliest years of the space program, The Right Stuff (1979). Undeterred by the hostile critical response to The Painted Word, and perhaps even encouraged by the stir the book made, Wolfe set about writing a critique of modern architecture. From Bauhaus to Our House was excerpted in Harper's magazine and published by Wolfe's long-time publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1981.
Wolfe bluntly lays out his thesis in the introduction to From Bauhaus to Our House with a riff on the patriotic song "America the Beautiful"
O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?
Wolfe criticizes the tendencies of modern architecture to avoid any external ornamentation. Wolfe praised architects like Louis Sullivan who, from the late 19th century to his death in 1924, built a number of ornate buildings. Wolfe turned his criticism on the International Style and Modern Architecture exemplified by architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius (the founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany, whose ideas influenced Modern Architecture, and from which the title of the book derives). Wolfe believed that the buildings of the International Style and Modern Architecture could barely be appreciated by those who had to work in them.
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