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
