Group 3 Bauhaus questions

4. How did gender play itself out at the Bauhaus? Was the later machine aesthetic in some way demonstrably “masculine”? 

·         When the Bauhaus in 1919 opened the constitution had stipulated an end to gender discrimination in many aspects of German life including an education , so women were no longer to be excluded from publicly funded institutions

·         In practice though Gorpous had separated women into more “female” roles, such as, pottery, book binding, weaving.

-Which was added because they wanted to break this age old discrimination

·         The Machine aesthetic could be considered to be masculine because it embraced the machine culture which usually would be things such as carpentry, architecture, engineering things, more reliable to machines, rather than what women would do which were pottery, weaving, etc.

5.  How did different Bauhaus professors approach the political issues inherent in design work in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s? Was the Bauhaus at its core an essentially conservative or liberal institution? 

·         The professors at the Bauhaus approached political issues in design work in Germany around the 1920s and early 1930s was that in the case of Paul Renner he designed this booklet called “kulturbolschewismu” which criticized the Nazi’s cultural policy.

·         The new Bauhaus in Weimar was funded by the state government of Thuringia, with support from the majority party, the liberal Social Democrats. But after only a few years the political winds were blowing in a more right-wing, nationalistic direction. The Bauhaus and its faculty came under conservative criticism and soon the school lost its funding. In March 1925 the Bauhaus closed its doors in Weimar and moved to Dessau.
After the Bauhaus left Weimar, some teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative political regime remained there and established a school of industrial design. Later known as the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, it would become the Bauhaus University Weimar in 1996.

·         Due to Bauhaus losing funding from a once liberal government in Thuringa, Germany, a majority of the faculty up and left which closed Bauhaus in Weimer then reopened in Dessau, demonstrates that Bauhaus political ideology corresponded with their belief in Liberalism or the idea of “free thinking”

·          6. If the “essence of the new typography is clarity” then why did its practitioners embrace sans serif type?

In the Die new Typographie, it states that “the essence of the new typography is clarity. This puts it into the direct opposite to the old typography, whose aim was “beauty” and whose clarity did not attain the high level were require today” however, when Tschichold’s conception of the sans-serif typography that found the simple font not only acceptable, but also felt that the modern photography could only be complemented by san serif block.

Group members:

Alejandro Perez

Evan Gallagher

Ashley Pierre-Maintus

Natalie Helver