Laszlo Moholy Nagy

This paper focuses on the analysis of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s curriculum at the Department of Architecture of the Armour Institute of Technology, which would be renamed Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and László Moholy-Nagy’s curriculum at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Special attention is paid to the teaching of the “Visual Training” course at the Armour Institute of Technology, which had some affinities with the “Preliminary Course” (Vorkurs) of the Bauhaus and was taught by Walter Peterhans, a Bauhäusler invited by Mies to join the Armour Institute of Technology, and served “to train the eye and sense of design and to foster aesthetic appreciation in the world of proportions, forms, colors, textures and spaces”. Mies prioritized “Visual training” over freehand drawing. For him, visual training was “indispensable as a means of recording an idea”, and drawing was to be understood as “a means of fostering insight and stimulating ideas”. Mies’s “Program for Architectural Education” was founded on his belief that students should be confronted, during their very first year, with the awareness that technique and ideas are interlinked. For this reason, he encouraged students to use drawings as a means of seeing. The overarching curriculum moved from “Means” to “Purposes” to “Planning and Creating”. Among the most discussed features of Bauhaus pedagogy is the Preliminary Course, the so-called Vorkurs. The way László Moholy-Nagy, director of the New Bauhaus founded in 1937, incorporated certain aspects of the Vorkurs in his curriculum, and especially in the Preliminary Course, at the New Bauhaus maintained the binary relationship between technology and aesthetics characterising Bauhaus pedagogy: that between Werkmeister and Formmeister. However, Moholy-Nagy replaced this binary relationship by a more complex tripartite system organised around art, science and technology. Moholy-Nagy believed that a new individuality was a prerequisite condition for a new society and his pedagogy was based on an ensemble of concepts drawn from Goethe’s understanding of epistemology and John Dewey’s pragmatism. One of the main objectives of this paper is to show that Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogical and epistemological vision was based on an effort to reconcile humanistic anti-materialism, and a perception of experience as a set of situations linked to Dewey’s conception of education.

SAVIO, S.M. Interseccions between Art and Archtechture- Study of Case - Olafur
Eliasson.2015. 183 f. Dissertação (Mestrado) - Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo,
Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2015.
The reflection about the experience of space and its folding about construction
and its physical spaces, on the limit between Art and Architecture, it was the purpose
of this research. The presentation of the Danish artist work, OlafurEliassoncreating an
overview of the study of space that the Artist has been carrying out since 1990.It is
installations of Art, which seeks a sensorial space, provocation of the visitor’s sense to
produce an experience of space. Because of the theoretical basis mentioned
frequently by the Artist and its artistic and architectural references, it is necessary one
chapter of understanding the theory of Eliasson’s masterpieces. Starting from the
contact with his artworks, narrowing the theme was defined around the aspects of
light and movement on the perception of space, where it highlights the references of
the Artist on History of Modern Art- The Kinetic Movement and the Group
Light&Space. The configured-triangle between the principle figures of these three
moments- Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, James Turrell and OlafurEliasson–serves as the access
to the repertory of the Danish Artist and it justifies the research not being focused on a
series of other notorious references of Eliasson. This thesis is divided, then, in three
chapters - the Presentation, the Understanding of the Theory and the Artworks of
Eliasson–in which the relationship is established on the examples of the artworks
commented. The tangle of theoretical references found on books of Eliasson has
consequences on the miscellaneous of Chapter 2. From the concepts clarified, terms
used by the Artist, on which artwork commented. On the analysis of two expositions
that occurred on the 2000 years, Take Your Time and Weather Project, it is better
understood his vocabulary and conceptual intentions applied on physical space. The
relevance of multiple researches of OlafurEliasson, which put him on the boarder of
Art and Science includes also the philosophical knowledge and its collaborators, such
as the curator Daniel Birnbaum, and culminates on the experiment of space on the
installations, on the participation of the public.
Keywords: Contemporary Art, Architecture, Art Exhibition.

At their most basic, the cinematic imaginary and the photographic fact help explain how specific techniques or even individual artworks could be viewed as quintessentially cinematic in the interwar period and archetypally photographic after the War.
The interwar and post-WWII avant- gardes were possessed by media whose direct products were virtually absent. In the 1920s, avant-garde films were rarities even as the avant-garde cinematic imaginary reigned supreme. The 1960s and ’70s avant-gardes marshaled photography everywhere and produced photographs (as such) nowhere.

Elcott, Noam M. "The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th Century Art." PhotoResearcher, no. 29 (2018): 7-23.

Modernist Cultures 12.3 (2017): 331–344. This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of early twentieth-century architecture and design, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, originally published in 1960. Banham surveyed the architecture, design, and visual arts of the 'first machine age', characterized by industrial production and motorized transportation, from a self-consciously thematized perspective within the 'second machine age', populated by expendable consumer technologies and images. This revisionist perspective enabled Banham to challenge long-standing myths propagated by the dominant figures of the modern movement. In his polemical emphasis on the contingency and plurality of that which had empirically transpired in first machine age, Banham rejected the reduction of the messy history of the modern movement to the victory of a putative 'international style'. Banham reasserted the intimate connection of architectural modernism with the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s and 20s, emphasizing particularly the most radical ones such as expressionism, futurism, and dadaism.

Le Corbeau et le Renard is devoted to the film oeuvre of Marcel Broodthaers (1924–76). What lies behind the concern to deal with these fascinating works is their great and even increasing relevance for contemporary art. The aim is, on the one hand, to explore the relations between the visual arts and poetry and/or language in the work of Broodthaers, who for a long time defined himself as a poet before stepping onto the stage of the art world relatively late (in his early forties). On the other hand, it addresses the form in which Broodthaers employs the medium of film to bring together or to reshape various types of artistic and non-artistic materials and inquiries.
Kunstmuseum Basel, 2014.

The Bauhaus show at the MoMA in 1938 was the first comprehensive exhibition of the Bauhaus. The political situation caused considerable obstacles for the organizers of the 1938 MoMA exhibition, making loans difficult and putting former Bauhauslers who were still in Germany at risk, but it does not comprehensively explain the divided reception of the show. What also needs to be taken into consideration is a substantial misunderstanding between the intentions of Gropius and his friends involved in the exhibition’s planning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the New York audience who questioned the relevance of the Bauhaus in the US at that moment.

Tempo, Tempo! is the first scholarly examination of the diverse corpus of powerful photomontages that Marianne Brandt created in interwar Paris and at the Bauhaus. Rooted in the Bauhaus project of engaging mass-produced visual cultures, Brandt’s montages served not only as a culturally-critical pendant to the sleek, practical metal designs for which she is better known; they also provided a model for confronting radical changes in gendered ideals in the wake of the First World War and addressing dynamic shifts in the visual fields of architecture, advertising and film. Bringing together images of Brandt’s 45 extant photomontages for the first time, the book explores this artist’s embrace of the dynamism of the modern metropolis and her engagement with pictorial theories of Bauhaus colleagues Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy.

Tempo, Tempo! was written to accompany the exhibition of the same name that was shown at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum of Design in Berlin (Oct. 2005–Jan. 2006), Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (March–May 2006) and the International Center of Photography in New York (June–Aug. 2006). This volume was supported by a generous publication grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

This is the 100-page "Reintroduction" written for the new edition (2013) of my book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983).  It provides an update of material in the original book and extends its coverage to the period 1950-2000.  For the specific  content, see under Books for this title, where the tables of contents for the Reintroduction and the original book are uploaded.

This study investigates the roots of interdisciplinary architectural and design education and methodology in Europe and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular this thesis is concerned with the establishment of the principles of a universal visual language within this context. Walter Gropius' (1883-1969) efforts to propagate a universal understanding of architecture, art and design at the Bauhaus is a central focus of this study along with the use of a universal visual language to facilitate such an ideal. This thesis argues that the instigation of the Bauhaus preliminary course, the Vorkurs, developed by Johannes Itten (1888–1967) and matured by Bauhaüslers Lázsló Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and Josef Albers (1888-1976) offered vitality, integrity, creativity and longevity to Bauhaus pedagogy and posits that the beliefs and practices of the Vorkurs contributed significantly to the translation of European modern design education in the United States. Although Bauhaus pedagogical translations were refuted by some and misunderstood by others in the wholly different economic context of the United States, this study proposes that the translations of the Vorkurs methodology, by the émigré Bauhaüslers, Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Albers at Black Mountain College and Yale and Gropius at Harvard contributed to the codification of modern twentieth-century design education, and as such continues to offer relevance in current architectural and design pedagogical environments.

The better quality pdf is downloadible from here: "http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LEAVol19No3-Mailman.pdf
Through recent artistic practices and technology of interactive systems for music, composition and improvisation have more and more blended and interconnected with each other – a sui generis situation now called comprovisation. The concept of comprovisation applies equally well to the spontaneous generation and manipulation of computer graphics, especially as such graphics are systematically coordinated audio-visually, while being subject to spontaneous manipulation by a performer.
This is explained in terms of the Fluxations and FluxNoisations Human Body Interfaces, interactive dance systems that generate music and graphics spontaneously in response to hand and body movement. They enable spontaneous expressive shaping of coherent complexity and variety. Thus a multi-layered multimodal experience arises. The aesthetic experience of this multimedia spectacle relates to experiences of various prior music and visual art of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, as well as to hypothetical physical realities. Thus a kind of cybernetic phenomenology of art is pursued and enacted through an embodied cybersynthesis of art with simulated alternate reality. Call it a pragmatic speculative realism, an adventurous technoetic ‘what if.’ As compared to more traditional forms of improvisation, the opportunities for risk-taking and aesthetic exploration rise to a new level of uncertainty, as the reactions of the improviser simultaneously draw from and target both visual and aural modalities, such that the intentions toward each fuse together."

... such as Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Adolf Behne, themselves undergoing trans-formations from the ''pathetic''to the ''objective.''61 Indeed all these developments paral-leled Francé's own ... The crucial figures in this regard were the Vogler couple and Fuhr-mann. ...

Students, teachers, and practitioners of design disciplines have still much to learn from the Bauhaus’ successive pedagogical experiments. The school attempted to bypass disciplinary boundaries through collective workshops on materials, classes for techniques of manipulation like drawing, weaving and carving, etc., and practical exercises on composition and form. Its pedagogy focused on manual work, collective tasks and creativity. Yet, it received different interpretations along the school’s history, shifting towards cooperative, social and reformist concerns, and tightening the relations with industry. By the late twenties, new forms of pedagogical cooperation between artists’ skills, craftmanship and scientific knowledge were envisioned. Confronting our own context surrounded and pervaded by technical objects, infrastructures and procedures, we can take some inspiration from Meyer’s Bauhaus, in particular, to renovate our pedagogical approach to design disciplines: what is left for collective creativity and interdisciplinary applications? How to foster such creativity through teaching and exercises, in order to rise to the challenges coming from a world to come?
One possible way is to emphasize the necessary improvement of environmental conditions, as the defining context of any individual or collective experience – including pedagogy itself. Along this line, I will sketch a possible connection between the Bauhaus Dessau’s teaching programs and pragmatist views of education. Dewey elaborated an inspiring, experience-based conception of education, in the widest social meaning of the term, in the exact same years of the Bauhaus experiments. Just as Gropius and Meyer, the American philosopher argued for a close consideration on context or environmental conditions, as a constant of human experience. At an immediate scale, this implied a close attention to the space of schools and classrooms themselves. At the largest, renewing pedagogy involved addressing the context of industrialization, urbanization and working conditions at the age of corporate capitalism. The orientations taken at Dessau toward an integrated education of vision (Moholy-Nagy) but also social concerns, environmental design and landscape (Meyer) suggest a possible convergence of views with pragmatist perspectives. They may inspire our own syllabi for training designers, architects and landscape architects. Focusing on that convergence, I will reconsider the issue of creativity in pedagogy through the concern for environmental conditions of shared experience. Designing built space as open-ended places, able to articulate scales and accommodate multiple experiences, seems the first and foremost task, both within and outside our schools.


[German:]
Lehrende und Lernende der Designdisziplinen können von den pädagogischen Experimenten des Bauhauses nach wie vor viel für die eigene Praxis lernen. Die Schule versuchte, disziplinäre Grenzen zu überwinden, indem sie gemeinsame Kurse über Materialien, Klassen für Techniken wie Zeichnen, Weben und Schnitzen usw. sowie praktische Übungen zu Komposition und Form einführte. Die Pädagogik stellte auf
Handarbeit, gemeinsame Aufgaben und Kreativität ab. Dennoch wurde sie im Laufe der Schulgeschichte unterschiedlich interpretiert, konzentrierte sich etwa auf kooperative, soziale und reformistische Anliegen und intensivierte die Beziehungen zur Industrie. Ende der zwanziger Jahre wurden neue Formen der pädagogischen Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kunst, Handwerk und Wissenschaft entwickelt. Aus Sicht der heutigen Welt, die von technischen Objekten, Infrastrukturen und komplexen Prozessen durchdrungen ist, können wir uns von Hannes Meyers Bauhaus inspirieren lassen, um insbesondere die pädagogischen Ansätze der Designdisziplinen zu erneuern: Wie steht es um kollektive Kreativität und interdisziplinäre Ansätze? Wie kann man diese Kreativität durch Unterricht und Übungen fördern, um den Herausforderungen der Zukunft zu begegnen? Eine Möglichkeit besteht darin, die notwendige Verbesserung der Umweltbedingungen als bestimmenden Kontext jeder individuellen oder kollektiven Erfahrung – einschließlich der Pädagogik selbst – hervorzuheben. In diesem Zusammenhang diskutiere ich die Parallelen zwischen den Lehrkonzepten am Bauhaus Dessau und pragmatischen Bildungsvorstellungen im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, wie sie etwa von John Dewey vertreten wurden. Dewey entwickelte eine erfahrungsbasierte Konzeption von Bildung, im weitesten sozialen Sinne des Begriffs, in genau den gleichen Jahren der Bauhaus-Experimente. Wie Gropius und Meyer plädierte der amerikanische Philosoph für eine genaue Betrachtung des Kontexts (genauer: der ›Umweltbedingungen‹) als Konstante menschlicher Erfahrung. Konkret bedeutete dies, dass man sich intensiv mit dem Raum der Schulen und Klassenzimmer selbst beschäftigte. Im größeren Zusammenhang der Bauhaus-Pädagogik wiederum ging es um den Kontext von Industrialisierung, Urbanisierung und den Arbeitsbedingungen im Zeitalter des Unternehmenrkapitalismus. Die in Dessau eingeschlagene Richtung einer integrierten Seherziehung (Moholy-Nagy) unter Berücksichtigung sozialer Belange, Umweltgestaltung und Landschaft (Meyer) deuten auf eine mögliche Konvergenz von Ansichten mit pragmatischen Perspektiven hin. Sie können unsere eigenen Lehrpläne für die Ausbildung von Designern, Architekten und Landschaftsarchitekten inspirieren. Mit Blick auf diese Konvergenz gilt es, die Frage der Kreativität in der Pädagogik unter Berücksichtigung der Umweltbedingungen und der gestalteten Umwelt als vielschichtigem Erfahrungsraum zu überdenken.

Bericht zum 80. Geburtstag von Reiner Kunze bringt  einen Überblick über sein lyrisches und übersetzerisches OEuvre samt bisher kaum gestreiften Momenten der Editionspolitik in der DDR aufgrund persönlicher Zeugnisse (am Beispiel der Anthologie der tschechischen Lyrik Die Sonnenunhr).

[ENG] The aim of this research is to analyse the pioneer architectural photobook, Internationale Architektur (1925), studying the convergence between Gropius’ ideological approach and Moholy-Nagy’s editorial design in order to build a solid message about the emerging modern architecture. By comparing photobooks designed by Moholy-Nagy previously, and taking into account the significant changes made by Gropius for its second edition (1927), it may be easier to understand the importance of dissemination as a modern, specific phenomenon; therefore, today we may see the International Style as a perfect commercial tag for advertising architectural Modernism, started with the launch of the first Bauhausbücher.

[ESP] Se plantea un análisis del pionero de los fotolibros de arquitectura, Internationale Architektur (1925), estudiando la convergencia entre enfoque ideológico de Gropius y el diseño editorial de Moholy-Nagy para construir un discurso sólido sobre la emergente arquitectura moderna. Mediante la comparación con fotolibros anteriormente diseñados por Moholy-Nagy, y considerando los significativos cambios introducidos por Gropius en su segunda edición (1927), se puede comprender mejor la importancia de la divulgación como fenómeno específicamente moderno; lo cual, hoy, nos permite poder interpretar al International Style como una etiqueta comercial óptima para la propaganda de la arquitectura moderna, iniciada con el lanzamiento del primer Bauhausbücher.

Tom Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, had it backwards: The Bauhaus, rather than being alien to the United States as Wolfe suggests, was originally home grown. The Bauhaus, established by architect Walter Gropius to promote a powerful fusion of art, technology, and craft, has renewed relevance now, when people are looking at ways in which education can stimulate creativity and innovation through learning that is more “hands on.” The Bauhaus (German for “build house”) was a “makerspace” par excellence. Far more often, architects shape the spaces in which learning occurs rather than the learning curriculum itself. Yet architects, since they straddle the fields of art and technology, have unique insight into the kinds of creative curricula now sought for STEM, and even more especially STEAM education. An overview of the Bauhaus highlights this.

Departing from the fact that László Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur (1929), had been an important source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, this article examines the affinities between László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s intellectual positions. The article places emphasis on two particular ideas: how Aalto and Moholy-Nagy conceived the connection of biology with standardization and technology and its relationship to light and perception. Special attention is paid to the notions of “flexible standardisation” and rationalisation in Aalto’s thought, as well as to his belief that nature and standardization should be conceived are closely interconnected. In regard to their shared intellectual development, the article sheds light on the first encounters of the two men including: their meeting at the second Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929; the June 1931 Finish meeting of Aino Marsio-Aalto, Alvar Aalto, Moholy-Nagy and Ellen Frank; the June 1931 exchanges between Aalto and Moholy-Nagy during the inner circle CIAM meeting in Berlin; and the common stay of the Aaltos and Moholy-Nagy in London in 1933 are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on Aalto’s “The Reconstruction of Europe is the Key Problem for the Architecture of Our Time”, in which he argued that standardization in architecture should draw upon biological models.

The influence of the German Bauhaus‘s Vorkurs (preliminary course) on schools of architecture and design in the 20th century has become so fa- miliar that many come to think of it as a point of mythic origin. Yet, despite its renown, the application for many of the Vorkurs exercises in the educa- tion of architects remains unclear. Originally conceived by Walter Gropius as an alternative to a normative Beaux Arts study of exemplars in antiquity, the Bauhaus promoted the education of artists and architects through ex- ercises that explored the compositional possibilities of different material effect and affects. After the departure of Vorkurs director Johannes Itten in 1922, the appointment of the Hungarian artist, László Moholy–Nagy as his replacement was predicated on Gropius’ reorientation of the Bauhaus towards “Art and Technology – a New Unity” during its 1923 Bauhaus Ausstellung (Bauhaus Exhibition). Inspired by the Austrian born botanist and nature philosopher Raoul Francé‘s concept of ‘bio–technique,’ Moho- ly–Nagy intended that students would extend a study of materials in the Vorkurs exercises to the creative imagination of “technische Form” (tech- nical form) in different media. To demonstrate this new approach to de- sign education in practice, Moholy-Nagy published two books, Von Mate- rial zur Architektur in 1929 (The New Vision in 1932) and Vision in Motion in 1947. Despite these examples, it remains unclear what role the Vorkurs material studies were intended to play in the imagination of architecture in particular. This paper explores the historical and theoretical implications of Moholy–Nagy‘s pedagogical approach towards design education in the creative translation of the Bauhaus’ Vorkurs material studies to new art and technological solutions for architecture.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians and urban studies scholars have been pleading for a more nuanced analysis of the Bauhaus in order to divorce from the one-sided affirmative reading of the iconic German art school. Yet, within the prevailing heroic narrative that still dominates contemporary public discourse after the 100-year anniversary of the school, the Bauhaus is praised for its affordable as well as working class-oriented design and it is thus depicted as intrinsically antithetical to today’s neoliberal housing market and bourgeois planning practices. To complicate this somewhat lopsided account, this paper draws on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of functionalist architecture and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower to examine the late Bauhaus through a biopolitical lens. It first presents the Törten working-class housing estate in Dessau, Germany to scrutinize how biopolitical socio-spatial practices crystalize in Bauhaus urban planning and architecture. The second part of the paper turns to the film screen to discuss how the Weimar-era narrative of bio-functional modernism materializes in Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy’s late 20s, early 30s filmic works on urban life, the so-called “city symphonies.” Considering the postwar afterlives of the Bauhäusler, the Conclusion places these findings in a broader historical perspective and reflects on the contemporary implications of a Foucauldo-Lefebvrian rereading of the Bauhaus. It is within this final contextualization that the paper inquires into the possibilities of people-centered urban dwelling in the age of biopower.