Marcia Feuerstein

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) an early twentieth century avant garde figure, is known for pedagogical, artistic, theatrical, and architectural projects in Germany between the world wars. As Master Teacher at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus, he was distinguished by his focus on the human body in space. This focus fits Schlemmer and his work firmly within the important subject of the human body and architecture. This dissertation focuses on the image of a male human body designed by Schlemmer, titled Vordruck, or form, which Schlemmer made into a standardized form that was handed out and used in his Bauhaus course, Der Mensch--the Human Being, in the late 20s. The Vordruck is used here to explore his ideas about the human body in the context of design and architecture at the Bauhaus. Schlemmer placed this human and Raum or space at the forefront of his productions. Yet the resoundingly maleness of the body and space of the Vordruck is revealed to have female origins: the source of the Vor...

The Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp designed by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, also known as Le Corbusier, has been studied, analyzed and explored by architects, theorists and historians ever since it was completed. Despite these studies, scholars have paid little attention to the east wall of the chapel as a unique architectural element. An important and iconic element within this project, it is distinguished by the turning statue of the Virgin Mary set in a cabinet within the wall and surrounded by small openings allowing light into the chapel. While the moving statue had always been part of the original design, the small openings -- the stars -- were not. Somehow and sometime the eastern wall became a sky when, at the beginning of construction, it was a wall. The story began with Le Corbusier’s slow design process, which allowed him to develop an evolving vision even after a design was finalized. His creative process allowed him to envision the building as a full scale model,...

This paper considers the Vordruck (form), a template of a male body designed by Oskar Schlemmer in 1928 at the Bauhaus for his course Der Mensch. The Vordruck, whose origins were based on both ancient precedents as well as the figure of a woman, is an innocuous, bland, seemingly silent and expressionless figure. While many copies of this template were printed for his course, the Vordruck took a leading yet hidden role throughout Schlemmer’s oeuvre of the human body in space within his drawings, costume designs and performances. The Vordruck template fits within the historic legacy of canons that reveal ideal proportions of the human body, including those by Polykleitos, Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci, yet it is unique when compared to these earlier canons as well as those developed later (Le Corbusier and others). Its significance is that it is the earliest modern canon of the human body developed specifically for architects and designers, before Le Corbusier’s Modular, while directly based on its historic precursors, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which he enacted within his theatrical experiments. At the same time the Vordruck represented the Bauhaus philosophy of designing type-models for mass production. Yet another previously unknown sources is a female body, whose unique physical form was erased as Schlemmer superimposed male traits over her body, transforming the female into the male body. This erasure recasts and reveals the absence and erasure of women within the Bauhaus.

The Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp designed by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, also known as Le Corbusier, has been studied, analyzed and explored by architects, theorists and historians ever since it was completed. Despite these studies, scholars have paid little attention to the east wall of the chapel as a unique architectural element. An important and iconic element within this project, it is distinguished by the turning statue of the Virgin Mary set in a cabinet within the wall and surrounded by small openings allowing light into the chapel. While the moving statue had always been part of the original design, the small openings-the stars-were not. Somehow and sometime the eastern wall became a sky when, at the beginning of construction, it was a wall. The story began with Le Corbusier's slow design process, which allowed him to develop an evolving vision even after a design was finalized. His creative process allowed him to envision the building as a full scale model, which provided him with freedom to take advantage of new opportunities of designing during construction. This occurred with the east wall. A serendipitous moment transformed the project as the scaffolding was removed and about to be finished. The resulting ‘as built’ changes embedded a unique sacred threshold into the chapel and its east wall. This narrative considers this curious story of how Mary moved from being situated in the wall to becoming part of, and central to, a night sky with diamonds. It also reveals a seemingly lost art of slower building and design

This paper considers the Vordruck (form), a template of a male body
designed by Oskar Schlemmer in 1928 at the Bauhaus for his course
Der Mensch. The Vordruck, whose origins were based on both
ancient precedents as well as the figure of a woman, is an
innocuous, bland, seemingly silent and expressionless figure.
While many copies of this template were printed for his course,
the Vordruck took a leading yet hidden role throughout
Schlemmer’s oeuvre of the human body in space within his
drawings, costume designs and performances. The Vordruck
template fits within the historic legacy of canons that reveal ideal
proportions of the human body, including those by Polykleitos,
Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci, yet it is unique when compared
to these earlier canons as well as those developed later (Le
Corbusier and others). Its significance is that it is the earliest
modern canon of the human body developed specifically for
architects and designers, before Le Corbusier’s Modular, while
directly based on its historic precursors, such as Leonardo da
Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which he enacted within his theatrical
experiments. At the same time the Vordruck represented the
Bauhaus philosophy of designing type-models for mass
production. Yet another previously unknown sources is a female
body, whose unique physical form was erased as Schlemmer
superimposed male traits over her body, transforming the female
into the male body. This erasure recasts and reveals the absence
and erasure of women within the Bauhaus.

"Der Städtbau. City Planning according to Artistic Principles" subtitled "A Contribution to the Solution of Modem Problems of Architecture and Monumental Sculpture Especially with Regard to the City of Vienna" was Camillo Sitte's 1889 contribution to city planning. He conceived planning through the placement of sculpture in the 'modern' (tum of the century) European city.  Sitte literally meant "city building" or town building,  implying small, locally situated conditions rather than generalized conditions that urban design or city planning imply.  The title also offers clues to building through artistic principles. First, one would achieve an 'artistic' place (read  'city') by enacting his principles and second, city building principles involve two entities - architecture and monumental sculpture. Third, one could consider these two distinct entities (architecture and monumental sculpture) separately, with each other and within the building of a city. Yet there is a fourth subtext embedded with in Sitte's thesis. This one reveals an attitude toward public action and publ ic space. This fourth attitude recognizes that public spaces characterize its population and accrue daily  to naturally become a cogent whole.  Sitte wrote as if the city was a stage that allowed citizens to fulfill their everyday lives. More than a mere backdrop, it provided time, space and purpose fora  habitual, visible and publicly enacted life.

Beginning in 1915, Claude Bragdon dramatically transformed his architectural work through theories of light, space, and the fourth dimension by designing theatrical events and settings. These projects created a series of alternative theatrical performance spaces and were demonstrations of "involution", a perceptual/psychological involvement with a setting, producing quasi-hypnotic effects. His exploration relied on his use of isometric perspective both practically and esoterically.  When he began designing theater sets in 1919, he worked within the "New Stagecraft" modernist approach to theater, and used isometric projections to transform how audiences experienced set designs, transforming two dimensional experience into three dimensional situations, within traditional theaters by dissolving the division between the proscenium and audience. This was a fourth dimensional approach to theater set design where an inside corner might suddenly appear as an outside corner (such as Roy Lichtenstein's House 1 or the "Necker cube". His designs were included projects from productions of Hamlet,, Cyrano de Bergerac,  and others.

Camillo Sitte concludes Der Städtbau,  his treatise on city design, with a winged snail.  Sitte’s colophon, his finishing touch is, at first glance, a conundrum.  Yet this winged snail signifies an urgent wish that Vienna’s city designers engage in the practice of festina lente while designing modern cities and, especially, Vienna’s Ringstraße. It also might refer to Vienna herself, formerly the center for escargot sold in her historic snail market on Jungferngaße, behind Peterskirche.  Describing slow, gradual design of public spaces formed out of the habits, actions, and activities of the city dwellers, he wrote  “It is not necessary now to rush into these matters [of city design]” instead planners should “consider every aspect, even the artistic aspect  … with great care …” Festina lente  (hasten slowly) seemingly contradictory, as with Sitte’s flying snail, is an image that, in Erasmus’s words, elegantly and in “succinct brevity, … [are] applicable to every activity of life … [they] ought to be carved on columns. … to be seen on all monuments everywhere…”  More recently, Frascari writes of festina lente for architectural drawing that  “… aims at a highly efficient and effective method for practicing long-term thinking within architecture.”  Another device for Festina Lente, Aldus Manutius’s  colophon of a dolphin twined around an anchor, first found in Colona’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), represents arrested speed, prudence, and stability.  Sitte’s flying snail is unique among typical emblems of festina lente, which include a flying turtle,  a snail combined with a rabbit, and Manutius’s image.  In this short paper I consider Sitte’s flying snail as emblematic of a method of both using and serving escargot as a paradign for design,  instilling designers with a desire for slow design and slow food.  Recipes may be included

In the writings of Sigfried Giedion, Hans Winger, and James Marston Fitch, the products of the Bauhaus were canonized as its image was sanitized and rationized.  Joseph Rykwert's study, "The Dark Side of the Bauhaus" in which he framed the 'other' Bauahsu as irrational, imprecise, and illogical proposition illuminated an inherent instability within the Bauhaus edifice.  The largely unexplored work of Oskar Schlemmer, artist-architect and Bauhaus master, reveals inconsistencies in the institution's official history that are greater still than those first explored by Rykwert.  Schlemmer, who merged the human body with space it occupied and defined, maintained an ambiguity and instability apparent in "Hausbau Bauhaus," his relatively unknown proposal for his design of the first international Bauhaus exhibit house (1923) in Weimar.

A theatrical inversion of everyday space transforms mundane and habitual life into one that becomes off-putting, strange, and, perhaps profound – an otherworldly representational double of the mundane. This theatrical switch within the city as well as the house provides  dramatic situations when extraordinary characters take up silence residence within everyday public and private spaces,  seeming to cast an affective presence onto actions of daily life.  This essay looks at the affective inversion through works and projects by Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) who taught theater and wall painting at the Bauhaus – and played a seminal role in German theatrical arts and architecture between the Wars.  The inversions consider both public  (Bauhaus) and private (residential) works.

Confabulations is a drawing together through storytelling.  Fundamental to our perception, memory and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals.  It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practed by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture.  Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range.  Beginning with an introduction framing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous threads structured around four key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory, and practice of stories.  Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour section,  Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.

... the implications of creating "ideal types" in the design and redesign of male and female human forms, as well as in the kind of architecture that was produced by the Bauhaus. This lens reveals how Schlemmer's bodies in space provoke architectural places of playfulness as well ...

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) an early twentieth century avant garde figure, is known for pedagogical, artistic, theatrical, and architectural projects in Germany between the world wars. As Master Teacher at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus, he was distinguished by his focus on the human body in space. This focus fits Schlemmer and his work firmly within the important subject of the human body and architecture. This dissertation focuses on the image of a male human body designed by Schlemmer, titledVordruck, or "form ." which Schlemmer made into a standardized form that was handed out and used in his Bauhaus course, Der Mensch — the Human Being, in the late 20s. The Vordruck is used here to explore his ideas about the human body in the context of design and architecture at the Bauhaus. Schlemmer placed this human and Return or "space" at the forefront of his productions. Yet the resoundingly maleness of the body and space of the Vordruck is revealed to have female origins: the source of the Vordruck was female. Schlemmer's Vordruck is the lens for a number of explorations. These include ideas of type, sources for this human type, the function of the canonical in artistic production, the implications of creating "ideal types" in the design and redesign of male and female human forms, as well as in the kind of architecture that was produced by the Bauhaus. This lens reveals how Schlemmer's bodies in space provoke architectural places of playfulness as well as ambiguity, vacancy, and indifference, and cause one to ask questions about events of that period in history and the acceptance of difference.