The Bauhaus of the 21st century?

Last week, I went to the exhibition Moderne am Main 1919 - 1933 at the Museum of Applied Art, here in Frankfurt. This is timed with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar, and showed the influence of Bauhaus design in the Frankfurt region.

The Bauhaus sought to unify art, craft and technology in all-embracing design for a new human being, a new way of living, "adapted to a world of machines, radios and fast cars." (Walter Gropius)

The exhibition was fascinating, and what became abundantly clear as I made my way around was that, in the words of the Museum "... if the Bauhaus was modernism's academy, Neues Frankfurt was its workshop."

If the photos above remind you just a little of IKEA, then you are not alone. There's currently another exhibition running, this time at London's Design Museum entitled Home Futures: Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow which takes again, the theme beloved of the Bauhaus - the merging of architecture, technology and everyday life - over the last 100 years. And the collaboration partner in this case is none other than IKEA.

I haven't been to this one, and probably won't get a chance, but would love to see the installations which examine the concept of home, for example, Uninvited Guests "... a series of connected smart devices tracking diet, health and sleep and intrusively offering advice on self-improvement." Yikes.

The Bauhaus movement arose in a time of change as electricity was becoming commonplace in everyday homes as well as cities, an industrial age, but also an age of increased connection via radio and telephone. IKEA conquered the world as the information age was born, with its democratisation of design.

With the digital age and its promise (or threat) of artificial intelligence, augmented/virtual reality, 3-D printing, cybercurrency, autonomous vehicles and all the rest upon us, I wonder who or what will be illuminating us on how to live? Who will be the real architects of the Smart Cities? Bauhaus was a design movement, IKEA is a retail brand. It's likely that the new Bauhaus will be a platform of some sort - social media, mobility, healthcare, retail, technology - who knows?

But will there be human beings behind (or in front of) the platform?

The death of objects?

Read any trend publication these days and somewhere along the way, you'll find a reference to how the  digitalisation of the world we live in, combined with a human desire for simplicity and clarity, will lead to a reduction in the number of things and objects in the home and office. In the past, we had an alarm clock, a telephone, a radio, a TV, a music player, a barometer, a grandfather clock, the household gods...OK, maybe not...but now everything is contained within one device.

There's no denying that digitalisation is one of the main forces governing the way we live, but even pre-digitalisation, predictions of the future focussed on a reduction in stuff and clutter, with visions of blinding simplicity and clear, clean lines.

But life's not like that. Have you ever seen the paperless office we'd all be working in by the turn of the century? Have you had your living room invaded by an army of yellow and red plastic, which takes up twenty times the space of its two-year-old general?

Let's think about the generations alive today. There's the generation of the post-war years, who hoarded everything from yoghurt pots to chianti bottles in case these things came in useful, or you could make a lamp out of them. A generation that kept everything because there were no copies or back-ups.

Then the generation who accumulated stuff because they could, and they could afford to: gadgets, status symbols, collections. And who now have parallel technologies - the latest iPhone and the retro-style record player for that collection of 200 LPs.

And now the generation who have the sustainability gene - with behaviour driven by reuse, recycle, reduce. A generation who decorate their electronic devices with a multitude of dangly crocheted bits 'n bobs - not dissimilar to household gods, in fact.

Overlaid throughout this is the human tendency to cosiness, to clutter, to comfort , to trash and frivolity. From paintings of teary orphans to singing gorillas to combat outfits for dogs. Yes, a lot of this has now moved online but that's also a parallel rather than replacement development.

Death of objects? I don't think so.

Ise's Infomercial

I gave a lecture on Saturday at the Bauhaus, Dessau as part of the Bauhaus Foundation's Summer School with the intriguing title "The Didactic Home."

Back in the 1920s, the Bauhaus was already "modern" in its marketing - with the Gropius house acting as a "showhome" for parties of interested housewives as well as using the media of the day - exhibitions and magazines. And "new media" in the 1920s meant film: at the weekend we were shown a fascinating film made in 1926: Wie wohnen wir gesund and wirtschaftlich? (How can we live in a healthy and economically sensible way?)

The film is a documentary which promotes an appropriate way of living in the industrial age. Although from a sociological or anthropological point of view the film is far from modern - Ise Gropius gets to demonstrate the walk-in wardrobe while the maid gets to do the washing-up - the nature of the film reminded me of a modern-day infomercial.

The functionality of design is demonstrated, from a mixing-bowl fastener, to a high pressure hose as a precursor to the dishwasher, to a day bed that swiftly converts to a sofa, to living room chairs so light they can be blithely pushed round from one place to another, to the walk-in wardrobe with its solution to the age old problem of how to keep shoes neat and tidy.

It's a hymn to how freeing your home of unnecessary ballast can for make a better life - healthier, more spiritual, more economic.

The Bauhaus in Dessau had a short life - a matter of a few years. There's something shrine-like now about much of it - closed doors and relics behind glass rather than the "Living Machine" of the 1920s. But perhaps the spirit lives on in a certain Swedish Home Furnishings store.