Phase 1 - Intro

           Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen…

The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again.

-Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar”

           

Walter Gropius enticed us all into the cathedral in his manifesto. It was a magnificent thing, that opening page – the six spires slicing through a cascade of vertical lines, starlight slashing across in all directions. In that cathedral we saw the unity that the Master begged us to pursue. We were the towers, we painters, sculptors, craftsmen, and architects, united by one holy mission: to pierce the heavens with the structure of the future.

            We strived for that synchronized vision, the harmony that the Republic could not maintain. The workers that rallied for change in the streets – some of them our own oil-smeared fathers – had been shoved aside as wayward Bolsheviks. They had been robbed of their revolution. Some of us felt that firsthand, after crouching in dank trenches and stalking hazy moonscapes. Those of us who served sought glory in battle. Instead we cowered in the dark, watched our comrades shrivel into corpses within shrouds of gas. And all that we earned for our service was a 20 billion mark debt.

            So we had lost our social revolution. But in the early Bauhaus, a new world beckoned to us – a blurred, pulsing reality, pared down to basic shapes and lines that danced through our wills. The Masters did not teach us art: they refined our senses so that we could craft it. A rusty saw blade could breathe new life in the center of a sculpture. A triangle could radically animate a still life sketch.  A single note could infuse a whole classroom with one colour.

            Did we ever raise a single building? No, of course not. The harmony we built in the Bauhaus– stretching in the classroom, sharing rice bowls in the dining hall, painting on the walls, throwing kites to the skies –could not transfer to blueprints that sold. Some of us knew this early on, the ones who scoffed at Grunow’s piano and snuck out for sausages. When van Doesburg demanded their freedom, they traded it in freely, surrendering every expression save what red, yellow, and blue could convey. But that is their own choice, and they shall explain it in time. For now we present ourselves, the cathedral of cascading lines that remained firmly set in paper.