The Bauhaus Paradox: Ideals vs. Reality

Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn’t like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes.

Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win?

European art in the 1800s might have seemed a bit conservative. It was typically sponsored by kings, dukes, and rich businessmen, via national artistic guilds that demanded strict compliance with classical styles and heroic themes. The Continent’s new progressive intellectual class started to get antsy, culminating in the Vienna Secession of 1897. Some of Vienna’s avante-garde artists officially split from the local guild to pursue their unique transgressive vision.

The point wasn’t that the Vienna Secession itself was particularly modern…

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