The German Bauhaus art institute and Italian Domus periodical offered what might reflect total opposite programs in the 1920s and 1930s – technological and scientific art in the Bauhaus and a language of emotion in Domus. The founding architects of each – Walter Gropius and Giovanni Ponti respectively – both inherited modernist theories in the age of manifestos and at the threshold of fascist cultural revolutions. Each represented conscious attempts to shape life beyond art and each harnessed abstract theoretical and emotional language to facilitate that aim. However, where Bauhaus instructors relied on analytical, often more metaphysical conceptions of the category of emotions, those in Domus constructed a language around specific feelings that were connected to specific artistic forms. These differences reflected larger distinctions in the structural makeup of the school and periodical, the representations of faculty specialties and heritages, as well as the respective fascist national contexts that shaped those programs. Therefore, this essay compares the Bauhaus and Domus, examines their similarities, and not just the dramatic differences between them, incorporates emotions and theory, and focuses the motives, logic, and national backdrops behind each project.
Introduction
In 1923, the founder of the Bauhaus art school in Weimar, Walter Gropius, proclaimed his paradigmatic thesis on the school’s aim: “Art and technology – a new unity!”[1] Gropius had expressed that exact thesis in 1910, in reprise of similar proclamations by art theorists like William Morris and Gottfried Semper.[2] Now, however, Gropius outright claimed that “[t]echnology does not need art, but art very much needs technology.” Indeed, Gropius bordered on a technocratism that predated Corbusier; Gropius urged the investigation of the “nature” of design functions – their “mechanics, statics, optics, and acoustics” – to make the “personal factor more objective” in artistic production. Corbusier himself would also tout “objective” assessments and “mathematical calculation[s]” that “put us in accord with universal law.”[3] Across the Alps from Gropius and the Bauhaus, however, the Italian architect and designer that founded the periodical Domus, Giovanni Ponti, rejected the “machine-à-habiter” and launched a new thesis: the “Italian Home.”[4]
Published in 1928 in Domus, Giovanni Ponti wrote:
“The so-called “comfort” in the Italian house is not only in the correspondence of things to the needs… This “comfort” of his is something superior, it is in giving us with architecture a measure for our own thoughts, in giving us with its simplicity a health for our customs, in giving us with its broad welcome the meaning of a confident and vast life, and is finally, it’s easy and happy and opens out and communicates with nature… the invitation that the Italian house offers to our spirit to go to restful visions of peace, consists in the true meaning of the beautiful Italian word, COMFORT.”
Far from the technocratic rhetoric of Gropius and Corbusier, “The Italian Home” focused on specific emotions in relation to architectural and design forms. In the span of a paragraph, Ponti not only constructed a coherent roadmap between happiness, comfort, nature, and simplicity, he laid the rhetorical cement for communicating and interpreting the motive force behind art: feeling. For him, this thesis translated to “love for the home.”[5] Ponti’s sentimentalist thesis contrasted significantly from that of Gropius in the Bauhaus: where Gropius focused on the analytical mechanics of art and the economic necessities of its embrace, “The Italian Home” based the motive force on emotional expression.
The Bauhaus and Domus functioned at critical junctures in Germany and Italy in the rise of fascist forces. Domus commenced just three years after Mussolini’s declaration of supreme power, and the Bauhaus closed in Europe by fascist forces in 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed as chancellor.[6] Indeed, the subject of emotion in fascist Italy and Germany has emerged as a notable area of interest in recent scholarship. In Richard Evan’s The Third Reich in Power (2005), Hitler is said to have exploited emotions “believing that in the age of the masses, the rational, verbal, intellectual appeal of previous ages was no longer enough.”[7] In recent decades, a host of sociological and historical surveys of the emotional wake in Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich have emerged as well.[8] This same turn toward emotion has occurred in studies of fascist Italy. For example, in Making the Fascist Self (1997), Mabel Berezin has described fascist public spectacles as “an arena of political emotion, a community of feeling, in which Italians of all ages were meant to feel themselves as fascists.”[9] [EH1] Berezin traces the aspects of emotion that pervaded fascist Italy: from the mournful commemorations and jubilant celebrations to the sentimental operas and Mussolini’s “fascist speeches.”[10] In fact, Mussolini himself claimed he continued public speeches to connect “my heart and your hearts” in his “love of the Italian people.”[11]
The turn to emotion in recent fascist histories reflects recent advances of a new subdiscipline – the “History of Emotions.” Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) and Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions (2003) have pioneered this burgeoning field, with high-profile associations at the Max Planck Institute and Queen Mary College emerging in support.[12] The key insight is that emotions are not static nor transcendent properties – instead, feelings themselves are contingent and heterogeneous across space and time. This means taking a step further than ordinary cultural histories, to see “love” as not solely a signifier of contextual cultural meanings, but more radically as a contextual feeling. As Thomas Dixon explains, emotions are “complex, emergent, [and] multi-component realities” and not “self-evident unities.”[13] In defining emotions, Dixon casts a wide net akin to “culture,” describing them as “composites made up in intricate ways from words, categories, narratives, metaphors, images, moral beliefs, religious attitudes, visual representations, bodily responses, behaviours, public performances, subjective experiences, feelings and testimonies.”[14] Our feelings can be applied to any facet of life, even if that feeling is mixed.
This analytic can be useful in art. Sarah Randles explains that emotions are not only reactive forces to our world; humans often change and create forms with the conscious intention to “express, produce, and regulate emotion.”[15] A brick can convey anger, for example, when launched into a window.[16] If material forms can both receive and transmit human emotion, then emotions constitute valuable sources for understanding how people felt about their material world, their experiences, and each other. Of course, these emotions carry historical baggage. Even in a life span, a couple’s concept and feeling of “love” evolves over decades of a relationship, just as a “delightful” painting in Renaissance Italy might be considered banal or fear-invoking to observers centuries later. [17] As we can see, the hermeneutics of emotion can be complex and encompass a bricolage of historical meanings and relationships: “love” could represent a unique cultural state that even incorporates other contingent emotions.
Emotions are not isolated constructions: the Bauhaus and Domus advanced their emotional and cultural regimes in their respective national and collective contexts. A whole host of emotional language emerged after Ponti’s thesis in Domus’ first issue in 1928, a current that continued far into the next decade. In the Bauhaus, the sacred “unity” that Gropius imagined likewise maintained for several of the school’s most prized instructors.[18] In spite of their technological focus, the Bauhaus was not devoid of emotional expressions; in fact, Kandinsky and Klee situated emotion as the root motive of all art. These connections between architects, designers, and artists in each community can even become what Barbara Rosenwein calls “emotional communities”: that is, the formal and informal associations of people with shared interests, stakes, and “systems of feeling.”[19] These systems are the “emotions that they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.” A focus on the Bauhaus and Domus, therefore, can reveal shared and changing intellectual and emotional patterns toward specific artistic forms.
A comparative examination of the ideological and emotional regimes between the Bauhaus and Domus is fruitful for their artistic and cultural similarities. The Bauhaus and Domus both inherited modernist theories in the age of manifestos and at the threshold of fascist cultural revolutions.[20] Each answered their turbulent national contexts with their own conscious attempts to shape life beyond art, and each harnessed abstract theoretical and emotional language to accomplish that aim. Of course, their contexts were different – where Domus commenced publication already under Mussolini’s regime, the Bauhaus was directly closed by National Socialists. There were also major differences in their respective emotional applications: Bauhaus instructors relied on analytical, often more metaphysical conceptions of the category of emotions, while those in Domus assembled a language around feelings connected to specific artistic styles. Finally, there were key natural divergences between the structural makeups of the school and periodical, as well as in the representations of faculty specialties and heritages. A comparative analysis of these national contexts, programs, and institutional structures can enhance our comprehension of the emotional and theoretical expressions of the Bauhaus and Domus.
The [EH2] focus on technology and science at the Bauhaus, however, was not necessarily antagonistic to the emotional language featured in Domus. Advances in emotional studies have conflicted the classical dichotomy between rational science and irrational emotion – even the most positivist path can be guided by potent emotions. Therefore, I examine the connections in the emotional and theoretical language between the Bauhaus and Domus: that is, how emotions and theory blended into complex expressions of identity. A comparative study that seeks the relationships, rather than just the dramatic divide between the Bauhaus and Domus, then can elaborate the content behind their respective programs. To this end, this project compares emotions and theory, as well as the motives, logic, and backgrounds behind the Bauhaus and Domus.
An Odyssey of Feeling: Domus and the Bauhaus
The foundation of feeling that Giovanni Ponti constructed in 1928, in “The Italian Home,” dominated future issues of Domus. That same year, the architect Luigi Piccinato featured a country house and called it a “happy example of modern Italian architecture.”[21] The house was not a revolutionary design in Italian architecture, but it notably lacked traditional ornament. For Piccinato, this lent comfort for an “easy and sweet” life; even the façade was engraved with the Latin text, procul omnis clamor et ira, “all the clamor and rage are far away.” In the same issue, Alberto Francini praised the “happy simplicity” of an Italian villa.[22] The open portico’s enchanting views and sun exposure, as well as its “naked” ivory façade, brought “grace and comfort” according to Francini.He concluded that the “happy” home’s “clear simplicity” in interior design made it “comfortable, amiable, serene, and welcoming.” Similarly, the architect Enrico Griffini characterized a white and rectilinear international style home as “gay and serene,” and even compared its allure against the “infinite boredom,” “aesthetic bitterness,” and “miserable… empty presumption” of traditional Italian costal villas.[23]
The emotional language in Domus was not entirely novel in architecture and design in the 1920s and 1930s. Decades earlier in 1910, the famous modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright had spoken of the “happily content” Italian buildings and their natural elements “one with them” that “resolves all into a composition harmonious and complete.”[24] Indeed, Wright’s “organic” architecture framed “simple” design forms in naturalist language: “A thing to be simple needs only to be true to itself in an organic sense.”[25] Prior in 1898, the architect Ebenezer Howard’s paradigmatic Garden Cities of To-morrow had also envisaged a “perfect combination” of city and country that secured “happiness.”[26] Even the machine aesthetics of Corbusier in France was not devoid of emotion. Corbusier himself thought that architecture aimed to establish “emotional relationships” that harmonized with a “universal order.”[27] As he explained in Towards a New Architecture (1923), “Architecture is a thing of art, a phenomena of the emotions” and “there is no art without emotion.”[28]
The Bauhaus and Domus represented two sides of Corbusier’s thesis of architecture: on the one hand, there was Ponti and those in Domus’ stress on the emotional ends of art, and on the other hand, Walter Gropius’ leaflet on the Bauhaus stage spoke of artists apprehending “natural laws” for “conscious application.”[29] Gropius’ scientism even included the hope that Bauhaus could “demonstrate Goethe’s ideas on the correlation of art and science.”[30] At the artist Paul Klee’s lectures at the Bauhaus, Klee claimed “Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art.”[31] Likewise, the Bauhaus painter and sculptor Oskar Schlemmer imagined an “art-edifice” of “Man” that “unites art, science, and technology” and that together shaped research and work.[32] The radical painter, photographer, and Bauhaus instructor, László Moholy-Nagy, suggested that novel technologies shaped life so dramatically that they could constitute the “vital force behind a new form expression.”[33] Nonetheless, Moholy-Nagy thought that “[w]e have no control over all the manifestations of the industrialized aspects of our lives.”
The notion of a science of art was by no means new in Germany. In 1896, the architect Gottfried Semper proclaimed that the “process of disintegrating existing art types must be completed by industry, by speculation, and by applied science before something good and new can result.”[34] Absent of science, Semper thought, “[w]e have artists, but no proper art.”[35] The impact of technology and scientific thinking in Italian art was not absent either. In the Futurist manifesto of 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched his technocratic dream of the “revolution in the modern metropolis” with technocratic imagery of “the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents; [and] factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke.”[36] Giovanni Ponti himself was aware of the impact of “industrial” technology. [37] At the end of the 1920s, at the origins of the Great Depression, Ponti claimed that economic imperatives necessitated Italians accept rational simplification and reject costly decoration of past styles.[38] According to Ponti, as economic considerations increasingly dictated the form of architecture and design, the tendency toward simple and standardized forms would be “inescapable” – decoration in “conflict with the economy of construction” would be eliminated.[39] For Ponti, this economic fact would achieve more “sincere” designs of beautiful geometric “lines and volumes… purged of decorative lies.” Ponti even attached this aesthetic development to authenticity and claimed that economic imperatives would entice artists to “search for a purity of sign, in a new harmony,” in a “non-fallacious” or “sincere” relationship between feelingand form.[40]
Giovanni Ponti’s appeal to authentic artistic expression was a major facet of the modernist project. According to modernist architects, imitating historical styles meant living according to past cultures rather than the “modern” present. The Austrian modernist designer Adolf Loos, for example, in 1898 likened imitation to the “tragic labor of Sisyphus” and urged that the “modern spirit” demanded “absolute truth.”[41] In Germany, in 1917, even the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Art petitioned that “the academies of art in Germany no longer reflect the spirit of the time.”[42] In Towards a New Architecture, as well,Corbusier connected “objects of modern life” with a “modern state of mind.”[43] For Corbusier, this was compared against the “old and rotting” designs of past styles and imitations. Even in the realm of decorative coverings, Frank Lloyd Wright lambasted coating veneers that attempted to imitate materials as a “vain” and “vulgarized” activity that only served to discount the authentic material.[44]
This paradigm was employed widely in the Bauhaus and Domus: authentic or “modern” expression was a major concern for both projects. In Domus, Luigi Piccinato claimed that Italians had “forgotten the true meanings of words” and that “[w]e are in age of fakes.”[45] The Italian country home that he featured didn’t “want to be anything other than houses: real houses that reflect our totally modern way of life and our way of feeling as men of the 20th century.” Piccinato echoed Frank Lloyd Wright and explained, “we paint the walls with wood; we varnish the wood with marble; we delude ourselves that country houses are villas and that rented houses are palaces.”[46] Giovanni Ponti himself had warned against “rigged” architecture that was not “sincere,” even adding that “[t]his is the rare thing that consoles us, that makes us peaceful and happy.”[47]Already in “The Italian Home,” Ponti attacked “extravagance,” “vulgar splendor,” and “misguided plagiarism” of historical imitation and positioned simple forms as their necessary antithesis.[48] The architect Robert Papini also urged readers to “accept simplicity and clarity as the norms of their living in art” and to “detect the useless, the plethoric, the superfluous.”[49] Papini’s rationale was to live in “one’s own time.”
Robert Papini was by far the most ardent in his critiques of historical imitation in Domus, even considering it a “force of inertia” hazardous to life.[50] He likened imitation to an aging English maid incapable of fresh and youthful thought. Papini’s rhetoric was biting and metaphorical, and typically involved diagnosing the pathology of imitators. In one article alone, Papini equated imitation to brainwashing, withered soils, and to a disease whose cure required nothing less than a total shift in values, habits, tastes, and economic production. Despite his superlative rhetoric, Papini’s themes were appropriated in Domus by other architects and designers. One author claimed that disliking imitation was “healthy,” and that that condemnation itself brought “joy.” [51] Another author took up Papini’s out of touch metaphor, and argued that “loving art of one’s time is a sign of faith in ourselves” while doing elsewise disrespected the Italian nation and people.[52] Papini built on this notion in 1929 and proclaimed “self-respecting” artists contributed to “daily happiness” and “comfort,” while imitations were only enjoyed by “decrepit mind[s].”[53]
Achieving “modern,” authentic expression was likewise a major concern for instructors at the Bauhaus. For László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus project itself meant creating “for man up-to-date furnishing.”[54] Like many modernists, Moholy-Nagy wasn’t clear about what “modern” meant, besides that it equated to a “constant state of resonance with the surrounding life.”[55] Nonetheless, Moholy-Nagy did imagine an artistic expression that could “open our eyes” to reality as it was, so long as it harnessed technological “objective exactness.”[56] Similarly, the painter Kandinsky in 1919 envisaged a “spiritual evolution” that unified “different art expressions” to the “innermost nature” of reality.[57] Kandinsky also put a spin of authenticity on his objectivism and thought that “[c]onsciously or unconsciously” artists aimed for Socrate’s dictum: “Know Thyself.” He continued, “the artist wishes to express himself and chooses only those forms which are sympathetic to his soul.”[58] The Swiss painter and designer Johanne Itten’s “first goal” of teaching at the Bauhaus was to “develop genuine seeing, genuine feeling, and genuine thinking.”[59] Itten concluded, “[e]mpty, superficial imitations should be removed like warts.”
These connections over authentic expression at the Bauhaus and Domus, however, reflected dramatically different programs at the level of practice. In the Bauhaus, achieving authentic expression was far more analytical than Domus, and often carried metaphysical theoretics as their basis. For example, a major theory prevalent among instructors in the Bauhaus was the classical thesis of movement of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The theory was conveyed by Paul Klee in a few words: “everything is in flux.”[60] According to Klee, “[a]ll becoming is based on movement.”[61] This movement launched the whole dimensional construction of art: “the line shifts to form a plane… [a] planes move to produce volumes. From the cosmic point of view, movement is the primary datum, an infinite power that needs no extra push.”[62] Drawing upon Aristotle and Hegel, this meant that “today,” or the “now,” was “over and done for,” and current, authentic art remained in a perpetual state of becoming.[63] Similarly, Moholy-Nagy pointed to the “[v]ital constructivity” of life and urged that “[w]e must therefore replace the static principle of classical art with the dynamic principle of universal life.”[64] For Moholy-Nagy, this was possible only by “heightening of his own faculties” and becoming “an active partner with the forces unfolding themselves.” Johannes Itten even incorporated motion into his pedagogy to uncover new forms:
“The experience of flowing movement is very impressive when forms are related in continous harmony. I dictated a sentence to show that rhythmic sensation is not mere schematic repetition but can be a flowing movement. I then made the students write the sentence twice as fast, then three times as fast, finally as fast as possible. They were amazed to find that this produced the strangest letter forms, which were beyond deliberate control and showed a highly rhythmical correlation. When the form of a simple object is added to the rapid writing, the individual rhythm of the handwriting is continued in this form; the form seems to belong to the handwriting. This observation brings a deeper understanding of rhythmic design.”[65]
The ancient Greek theoretic of motion at the Bauhaus resembled another loan that represented their central preoccupation: “unity.” Whether conscious or not of this lineage, Bauhaus instructors drew heavily on Hegelian and Ancient Greek philosophers’ notions of parts, wholes, opposites, and synthesis to develop a unique framework that explained not only their pedagogical praxis, but the aim of the Bauhaus’s own structural fabric. As Paul Klee maintained, “[t]he aim of our theoretical work is always, in one form or another, the organisation of differences into unity, the combination of organs into an organism.”[66] According to Klee, that “unity” arose by the “synthesis of differences” that constitute that “whole” – strikingly similar to the “science” that Aristotle advocated for in his Metaphysics.[67] Johannite Itten likewise claimed that the “foundation of my design teaching was the general theory of contrast.”[68] Under Itten’s guidance, students were tasked with thinking of three forms of opposition: “to experience sensuously, to objectify rationally, to realize as a synthesis.”[69] Similarly, for Moholy-Nagy the “essence” of painting was the “production of tensions” or “harmonies in a state of equilibrium.”[70] Indeed, he described “Man” as a “synthesis of all his functional apparatuses,” with art representing only an extension of the “human” drive toward function.[71] The Idealist Kandinsky claimed different forms of art “which stand in different relationship to each other… subordinate themselves to the combination of the whole.”[72] According to Oskar Schlemmer, as well, “Man is a creature of emotion and reason and many more dichotomies.”[73] Schlemmer concluded, “[man] carries these within himself and is much better able to reconcile himself continuously to the fact of this duality within himself.”
As Schlemmer’s claim indicates, the abstract, dualistic and “unity” metaphysics did not preclude emotion from the theoretics of Bauhaus teachers. Paul Klee himself claimed that a “picture has no particular purpose” besides “making us happy.”[74] Where Klee viewed emotion as the primary objective of art, Moholy-Nagy placed it as the first principle, explaining that to “form a comprehensive attitude to existence we must start out simultaneously from emotion and cognition.”[75] In fact, decades earlier Kandinsky had advanced that same thesis, claiming that “everything particularly in the beginning is a matter of feeling.”[76] He added, “[o]nly through feeling particularly in the beginning, is it possible to achieve what is artistically right.” Kandinsky moreover explained that art reflected not only its historical period, but that milieu’s emotional force. In the “Epoch of the Great Spiritual” that Kandisnky believed had commenced, he even imagined society achieving deeper emotions than the “elementary, baser emotions such as fear, pleasure, sorrow.”[77] Even Gropius, in the original 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, envisaged the “joy” that could be attained if only artists left “isolation” and participated in the construction of modern life.[78]
Although these few references to emotion resembled Domus in their common concern for authentic or “modern” expression, Bauhaus instructors’ abstract and analytical concepts never matched the direct references to form seen in Domus. Indeed, after half a decade of Domus, authors continued to rely on the original roadmap of feeling sketched out in “The Italian Home.” For Ponti in 1932, “loving and passionate interpretation of today’s life” meant “frank” forms that exhibited “elemental simplicity.”[79] Carlo Felice meanwhile celebrated the comfort and happiness of the “purity of line” – a love that Felice claimed originated from Italians’ innate “desire for order, measure, [and] clarity.”[80] Even in Domus authors’ assessment of the V Milan Triennale exhibition that Ponti directed in 1933, Maria Parpagliolo praised the “happiness” of an international style home on the grounds that it united architecture and nature.[81] Carlo Rava even used negative emotions to devalue rival forms. He pointed his finger at “blind” followers of “pure” rationalism who were dazzled by rigid and abstract codes.[82] According to Rava, their stale personalities were decipherable from their architecture, which was sterile, uninventive, “bare and poor, gloomy and desolate,” and at best, expressed “dignified misery.”
Of course, abstract concepts like “elemental simplicity” cannot be readily interpreted into specific forms without the support of visual material, which Domus authors supplied to inform their concepts. At the least, Domus constructed a rhetorical and visual reference guide around specific emotions through both classes of material. Although their corresponding forms would gradually change between the late 1920s and 1930s, Domus architects and designers’ language continued to co-opt emotion as a common hermeneutic for form. Nonetheless, rectilinear architecture and design dominated the periodical up to the 1933 Milan V Triennale, where the exhibition catalog advertised Milan’s “squares and triangles chemically elaborated between splendid and diligent straight channels.”[83] That same year, the Bauhaus closed after over a decade of assault from conservative press without ever forming such a clear emotional grammar, at least one that centered specific emotional properties sufficient enough to constitute a coherent map of feeling. Even if feeling held such a pivotal place as the first principle for Kandinsky and Klee or the teleological end for Moholy, without determining one feeling in particular, there lacked a common standard for an “emotional community” to rally behind in the first place. Where Ponti presented easy-to-digest and exalted emotions like “happiness” and “gladness,” the Bauhaus’ scant references to emotions revolved around their metaphysical structure in general and not emotional contents themselves.
The Structure of Feeling
The differences between the Bauhaus and Domus represented far more than ideological and emotional slants of Gropius and Ponti. Each program reflected institutional contingencies and broader cultural contexts that shaped their artistic and emotional expressions. The founding of Domus, for example, operated within the emotional pathos that Mussolini and Italian fascists crafted in their attempts to shape the nation’s culture[EH3] . In Making the Fascist Self, historian Mabel Berezin has shown the “public emotion” that proliferated in commemorations, celebrations, sentimentalist melodrama and opera, news accounts, as well as in Mussolini’s speeches in fascist Italy. According to Berezin, “public spectacle was the regime’s attempt to create temporary fascist communities of emotional attachment that would create bonds of solidarity which would last long after participants left the piazza.”[84] Emotional language and feeling for fascists were means to achieve integration and construct links between Italians under the regime.
The application of emotion in fascist Italy was similar across borders by National Socialists. In George Mosse’s Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, National Socialism is characterized as an “emotionally charged and unified ideology which was translated into fact by 1934.”[85] According to Mosse, Hitler imagined the unification of the anxious masses “through a feeling of belonging to a greater emotional community.”[86] The construction of that “emotional community” looked similar to fascist Italy, especially at the level of public displays of feeling. Although there is much formal work required on the connections of National Socialism and emotion, recent entries have corroborated this thesis.[87] In Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (2011), the Nazi movement is said to have “proved highly adept at stirring emotions for political purposes,” a practice that became “thoroughly institutionalized” once Hitler assumed the chancellorship.[88] Even the symbol of Hitler himself was crafted in resemblance of his fascist mentor Benito Mussolini: an erotic figure of love enchanting scores of women.[89] The celebrations and commemorations of fascist Italy likewise found their counterpart under National Socialism in public ritual and speech – as Hitler himself maintained, Nazism aimed to stir “volcanic eruptions and human passions and emotional sentiments… by the firebrand of the world hurled among the masses[EH4] .”[90]
The attempts at cultural transformation by National Socialists, however, was still in early phases as the Bauhaus operated their school. The closure of the school in fact was itself one act in that process. Although a decade earlier in Mein Kampf, Hitler lambasted the “new artistic trash,” his explicit nationalist vision for art was still in the process of construction in 1937, as he declared in a speech: “[German art] shall see the standard for that art in the German people, in its character and life, in its feeling, its emotions, and its development.”[91] Of course, the rising conservative tide of 1920s Germany shaped the Bauhaus’ operations. The school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925 after a right-wing coalition succeeded power in Thuringia and halved the school’s budget as its first measure.[92] Then, in 1932, the Dessau Nazi faction closed the moved school by communal ordinance. That concluded the Bauhaus’ formal existence in Germany. All throughout the 1920s, Gropius had defended against critics’ attacks, noting that “[c]riticism is more severe at the Bauhaus than anywhere else.” [93] The Bauhaus rebuffed the charges of the “deepest spiritual isolation and disintegration” levied by critics like Konrad Nonn – Gropius indeed commented that “so far we have steered clear of the cliffs of German dogmatism.”[94] Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, however, in 1932, after the decision to demolish the Dessau Bauhaus by National Socialists authorities, the local paper Anhalter Tageszeitung still professed its closure meant the “disappearance from German soil of one of the most prominent places of Jewish-Marxist ‘art’ manifestation.”[95]
The differences in the emotional expressions of the Bauhaus and Domus also reflected their structural institutions. As a school, a great deal of the material conveyed at the Bauhaus remained private to correspondences and lecture notes, except for the publications of more renowned theorists like Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky was an accomplished theorist of art and society in his own right already in 1912, after his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. That public success in print was not normal at the Bauhaus, and few works reached comparable levels of fame from the schools’ faculty.[96] A small Bauhaus journal that ran 19 issues between 1926 and 1931 did receive a readership, but it reworked its editorial staff as much as the schools’ faculty changed: first it was edited by Gropius and Moholy-Nagy for 5 issues until 1928; then it ran for 14 months under new editors; and after a hiatus it rebooted in 1931 for 3 final issues. The short stint and varied leadership reflected a broader practical problem that the Bauhaus faced – achieving “unity” of a highly distinct cast of individuals all while surviving an onslught of criticism and funding issues.
This practical problem speaks to the dramatic focus on “unity” in the first place at the Bauhaus – for that vision was only ever a far off ideal, rather than a concrete fact. Almost immediately after the Bauhaus’ founding manifesto, the instructor Paul Klee noted in 1921 that “forces so differently oriented are working together in our Bauhaus.”[97] Still, Klee thought “conflict between these forces” was a “good test of strength” for the school. Klee was certainly correct in his estimation of the school’s kaleidoscopic variety: there was the Idealist, Russian Kandinsky; the radical socialist, Hungarian Moholy-Nagy, and the Swiss-German Paul Klee. Each instructors’ personal programs at the Bauhaus led Gropius to reaffirm only a few months after Klee that “this unity cannot be represented by one person but only by the concerted efforts of a number of people in harmony with each other.”[98] One month later in November of 1921, however, Gropius was persuaded to review the “theoretical and practical principles” of the Bauhaus out of cause of the “differences of opinion on crucial problems.”[99] He once again affirmed, “I seek unity in the fusion, not in the separation of these ways of life.”
Gropius clearly expected a degree of conflict at the Bauhaus: he wrote that “such an experimental institute is especially sensitive to fluctuations in the developments of the times.”[100] However, it did not take long after Gropius’ departure for his highest aim of “unity” to be cast aside. Gropius’ successor Hannes Meyer denounced the “art” of the union of “Art and Technology” on the grounds that “building is a biological process” and not an “aesthetic process.”[101] Not long after, Meyer was dismissed on account of his Marxist sympathies and was soon replaced by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.[102] Rohe believed “the propagandistic approach of the Bauhaus in the early years to be just what was wrong.”[103] Rohe claimed he desired to avoid “all propaganda.” However, after just three years as director, the Bauhaus was over – closed by fascist order. As one student at the Bauhaus reported in 1932, just one year before its closure, “[t]oday the Bauhaus is a school in which cliques prevail as hardly anywhere. Absolutely nothing is left of a ‘free’ working community of active people.”[104]
The contention and disorder at the Bauhaus were not matched in Giovanni Ponti’s Domus. In the first place, Domus was composed of Italians that wrote in Italian, and therefore did not hold the diversity of national backgrounds that Bauhaus had attempted to unify. A major theme in Domus, in fact, was the Italian, “Mediterranean,” and the “Latin” identities that architects and designers readily conceived to define themselves and their work. Carlo Rava, for example, appealed to the “eternal Latin spirits” of Italians to encourage rationalist design forms.[105] Giovanni Michelucci likewise compared contemporary rationalist buildings with those from Renaissance paintings of architecture, revealing their “affinity of spirit.”[106] Nonetheless, even under Mussolini’s fascist state, Domus never faced serious opposition to their design programs. Mussolini was famously unengaged and often contradictory about which architectural style he promoted; unlike other arts in the nation, strict stylistic codes were never imposed on architects or designers.[107] The founding architect of feeling in Domus, Giovanni Ponti, ran the periodical until his death in 1979 (besides for a short break during World War II). The periodical still operates today and even ran for decades from the basement of Ponti’s last apartment at Via Dezza in Milan. From a structural and national standpoint, Domus did not face the same constraints that shaped the emotional and theoretical expression at the Bauhaus.
At the level of expression, however, what Ponti and Domus achieved was not revolutionary. Ponti’s original thesis in “The Italian Home” simply elevated a few conceptual motifs as the aim of architecture and design – a maneuver tantamount to what Aristotle’s “Good” represented in the Nicomachean Ethics centuries prior. The greater feat in Domus was that artists maintained and expanded that emotional framework over at least a decade. Still, the stakes behind Domus were never as high as at the Bauhaus. The periodical was marketed to affluent citizens of Milan that could see fancy products like refrigerators and the radio, and even occasionally purchase the art Domus showcased. Domus never postured itself as overtly serious either. Light articles on cooking, gardening, conversation etiquette featured alongside more theoretical applications of Fordist motion studies in the kitchen, for example. The magazine maintained the status quo in the topics of women and their role in the home, just as Domus stayed quiet about Mussolini’s regime. There was certainly incentive for Ponti to discourage such a thing. In the 1930s, Giovanni Ponti rose to great heights of fame in Italy – he directed the V Milan Triennale exhibition; designed significant building projects, including for the largest chemical corporation in the nation, the Montecatini; and began teaching at the prestigious technical university, the Politecnico di Milano.[108] Although Ponti did not personally convey fascist support, the program that he directed at the V Milan Triennale aimed to offer “magnificent evidence of the Italian energies resurrected by Fascism.”[109]
It is not necessary to connect Ponti’s complacency toward Italian fascists to his emotional rhetoric. As we have seen, the emotional expressions were already present in the modernist architects that Ponti and Domus inherited. Still, to co-opt the cultural torrent behind feelings that fascists were generating speaks to the resonance that emotion held for architects, designers, and artists in the periodical. In the cultural milieu of the Bauhaus, National Socialists’ force of emotion could only be hostile for the school’s technological ideal. The dichotomies of technological, scientific reason versus irrational, exploitable emotion (core to National Socialist propaganda) alone could discourage Bauhaus theorists from fastening feeling to their scientism.[110] Instructors could refer to their central paradigm to interpret emotion itself – at least so long as that analytical language took precedence over emotion in interpretation. Perhaps, this basic interpretational key shared the greatest likeness to Domus. The analytical remarks on emotion in Bauhaus and the thesis of “The Italian Home” could each be learned in minutes for ritualistic repetition, and each explained the total force of all art.
Where “The Italian Home” laid the rhetoric and emotional cement for decades in Domus, the scattered mentions of emotion at the Bauhaus never managed to coalesce into a lasting force. The catalytical experience of the school discouraged “unity” from the start: much of the effort focused on surviving political and financial distress, let alone determining and actualizing an artistic plan.[111] This is in spite of the diverse representations of faculty specialties and heritages. In Domus, these problems never challenged the school’s security in a significant manner. Ponti could easily draw upon modernist thought to sketch out an emotional framework connected to specific design forms in a culture that played heavily upon emotion. Ponti himself thrived in the fascist environment, as his message had in Domus. After the V Triennale, Ponti reflected on emotion in architecture and design. He explained that forms “emanate” impressions of art’s “identity”– that decisive relationship between “expression and content.”[112] Ponti wondered, “what is the house like for us today?” and “how are we today for the house?” Curiously, Ponti thought there was nothing “physically” new under the sun – not the pergolas, terraces, nor the large windows facing the sea– but what had changed was the individual and their deepest “desires” and “passions.” Perhaps, Ponti was only harnessing fashionable catchwords of Italian fascism, but his insinuation that Italians’ passions were embedded in their attitudes and that both the attitudes and emotions had changed, indicates Ponti himself discerned emotions as individual, social, and mutable elements that shaped Italians’ perspectives of the world.
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Notes
[1] This essay draws heavily on the collection of translations in the edited book, Hans Maria Wingler and Joseph Stein, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, trans. Wolfgang Jabs (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980). For Gropius’ essay, see Walter Gropius, “Breviary for Bauhaus Members,” in Ibid., p. 76.
[2] In a memorandum presented for a program of a housing-construction company, Gropius explained, “Thus, art and technology would be happily united and the public at large would be able to acquire truly mature, good art and solid, genuine goods.” Walter Gropius, “Program for the Founding of a General Housing-Construction Company Following Artistically Uniform Principles, 1910,” in Ibid., pp. 20-21.
[3] Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), pp. 1, 6-7, 197, 263.
[4] The famous article was titled “La casa all’Italiana.” From here forward, I refer to it as “The Italian Home.”
[5] “L’amore,” Giovanni Ponti, “La casa all’Italiana,” Domus 12, December 1928.
[6] Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Reform and Avant-Garde (Köln, Los Angeles: Taschen, 2010), p. 92.
[7] Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 208.
[8] For two recent entries, see Anna Parkinson, An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Frank Biess, German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
[9] The full moniker is Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 27.
[10] I use the language of Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi here in reference to Mussolini’s speeches. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 85-86. Emotion features as a large key to the “Fascist Self” in Berezin. See Ibid., pp. 30, 37-38, 41, 48, 72-73, 82-83, 113,123, 147, 175-176, 239.
[11] Quoted in Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, pp. 24, 86.
[12] The monikers are Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) and Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2003).
[13] Thomas Dixon, “What is the History of Anger a History of?” Emotions: History, Culture, Society 4, 1 (2020): p. 31.
[14] This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, it does illustrate the relationships between emotion and all forms of language.
[15] Sarah Randles, “The Material World,” in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide (1st ed.), ed. Katie Baclay,Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter Stearns (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 159.
[16] Ibid., p. 160.
[17] Ibid., p. 162.
[18] As we will see, I refer to Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer.
[19] Barbara Rosenwein, “Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions,” Passions in Context, 1 (2010): p. 11.
[20] For a source book of programs and manifestos in the period, see Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971).
[21] Luigi Piccinato, “Una Casa di Campagna,” Domus 2, February 1928.
[22] Alberto Francini, “Una Villa in Riviera,” Domus 2, February 1928
[23] Enrico A. Griffini, “Esempi Stranieri Modernissimi di Case Economiche,” Domus 3, March 1928.
[24] Frank Lloyd Wright, “Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright,” in The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 52-53.
[25] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” in Ibid., p. 28.
[26] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1902 [1898]), p. 15.
[27] Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 4, 31.
[28] Ibid., p. 19, 164.
[29] Walter Gropius, “The Work of the Bauhaus Stage,” in The Bauhaus, p. 58.
[30] Walter Gropius, “On the Proposed Remodeling of the Vestibule of the Weimar Art School, for the Bauhaus Exhibition Summer 1923,” in Ibid., p. 28.
[31] Paul Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller and trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p. 70.
[32] Oskar Schlemmer, “The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” in The Bauhaus, p. 66.
[33] László Moholy-Nagy, “New Film Experiments,” in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1987), pp. 319-320.
[34] Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry, and Art,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 144.
[35] Ibid., p. 146.
[36] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurism: An Anthology, Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 51-52.
[37] “industriale,” Giovanni Ponti, “La ‘casa degli architetti’ alle esposizione di Torino,” Domus 9, 1928.
[38] Giovanni Ponti, “Formazione di Alcuni Caratteri Stilistici Contemporanei,” Domus 24, December 1929.
[39] Giovanni Ponti, “Occorre Dare un Meracto Nazionale alla Produzione Moderna Italiana,” Domus 48, December 1931. Ibid.
[40] Ponti’s argument predated historians of emotions such as Sarah Randles’ dialectic between material form and emotion, but Ponti focused on “sincere” expressions, not emotions themselves.
[41] Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900, trans. Jane Newman and John Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 16-17, 94.
[42] Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Art, “Petition to the Ministry of State Regarding Reform Recommendations from the Faculty. Minutes of the Proceedings of October 3, 1917,” in The Bauhaus, p. 25.
[43] Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 276.
[44] Wright authored several essays lambasting guising materials in finishes and paints. Wright wrote “[t]he darkness of death is descending on wood by way of unenlightened architecture. The life of the tree has been taken in vain as the stick, the substance of the shapely stick, to become imitation-à-la-mode: the precious efflorescent patterns of wood, to be painted out of sight; its silken textures vulgarized by varnish in the mis-shapen monstrosities of a monstrous ‘taste.’” For Wright, “[e]ach material has its own message and, to the creative artist, its own song.” See Wright, “In the Cause of Architecture IV: The Meaning of Materials – Wood,” in The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright, pp. 121, 127.
[45] Luigi Piccinato, “Una Casa di Campagna,” Domus 2, February 1928.
[46] See Wright, “In the Cause of Architecture IV: The Meaning of Materials – Wood,” pp. 121, 127.
[47] Giovanni Ponti, “La Casa Chierini in Trieste,” Domus 16, April 1929
[48] Giovanni Ponti, “La casa all’Italiana.”
[49] Roberto Papini, “Di Giovanni Michelucci Architetto,” Domus 25, January 1930.
[50] “Rinnovamento nel Mezzogiorno,” Roberto Papini, Domus 22, October 1929.
[51] “Per il Sammichele,” Domus 22, October 1929.
[52] “Rispetto di noi Stessi,” Carlo Felice, Domus 23, November 1929.
[53] “Casa Gould in Roma,” Roberto Papini, Domus 24, December 1929.
[54] László Moholy-Nagy, “Experimental and Modelling Workshop,” in Moholy-Nagy, p. 298.
[55] László Moholy-Nagy, “Contemporary Typography – Aims, Practice, Criticism,” in Ibid., p. 293.
[56] László Moholy-Nagy, “Sharp or Fuzzy?” in Ibid., p. 308.
[57] Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), p. 34.
[58] Ibid., p. 56.
[59] Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1975), pp. 177-178.
[60] Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1, p. 59.
[61] Ibid., p. 78.
[62] Ibid., p. 357.
[63] Ibid., p. 59.
[64] Moholy-Nagy, “Dynamic-Constructive Systems of Forces,” in Moholy-Nagy, p. 290.
[65] Itten, Design and Form, p. 129.
[66] Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1, p. 449.
[67] Aristotle wrote, “Now since it is the work of one science to investigate opposites, and plurality is opposite to unity, and it belongs to one science to investigate the negation and the privation because in both cases we are really investigating unity, to which the negation or the privation refers — in view of all these facts, the contraries of the concepts we named above, the other and the dissimilar and the unequal, and everything else which is derived either from these or from plurality and unity, must fall within the province of the science abovenamed… For all things are either contraries or composed of contraries, and unity and plurality are the starting-points of all contraries.” See Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, trans. W.D. Ross and ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 1605-1607. Ibid., p. 433.
[68] Itten, Design and Form, p. 12.
[69] Ibid., p. 17.
[70] LászlóMoholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film,trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p. 23.
[71] Ibid., p. 30.
[72] Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 49.
[73] Oskar Schlemmer, “The Mathematics of the Dance,” in The Bauhaus, p. 118.
[74] Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1, p. 454.
[75] Moholy-Nagy, “New Film Experiments,” p. 320.
[76] Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, p. 58.
[77] Wassily Kandinsky referred often to a “Great Epoch” that amounted to a Renaissance of Idealism after decades of materialist and positivist philosophies. Similar to Kandinsky, in Italy, the “philosopher of fascism” Giovanni Gentile also imagined a “Rebirth of Idealism” that countered the strand of positivst and materialist philosophies that he thought monopolized thought. Moreover, the scientism and technocraticism at the Bauhaus should not be equated with either positivism or materialism. As we’ve seen, metaphysical theories often appeared in tandem with proclamations of science at the Bauhaus. Even Oskar Schlemmer spoke of the “cosmic being” of “transcendental world of ideas” in his theories of natural science. Wassily Kandinsky, “Foreword to the Catalogue of the First International Art Exhibition, Düsseldorf,” in Complete Writings on Art: Volume Two (1922-1943), ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), p. 479. Oskar Schlemmer, Man: Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus, trans. Janet Seligman and ed. Heimo Kuchling (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971), p. 25. Giovanni Gentile, La rinascita dell’idealismo. Prolusione ad un corso libero di filosofia teoretica letta nella regia Università di Napoli il 28 febbraio 1903 (Naples: Alfonso Tessitore e Figlio, 1903). Ibid., pp. 10-11.
[78] Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” in The Bauhaus, p. 31.
[79] Giovanni Ponti, “Ieri e Oggi,” Domus 58, October 1932.
[80] Carlo Felice, “Qualita’ dei Mobili d’Oggi,” Domus 51, March 1932.
[81] Maria Parpagliolo, “I Giardini e la Floricoltura alla Triennale,” Domus 67, July 1933.
[82] Carlo Enrico Rava, “Spirito Latino II,” Domus 38, February 1931.
[83] Fondazione La Triennale di Milano, Triennale Di Milano, p. 51.
[84] Berezin, Making the Fascist Self, p. 30.
[85] George Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968), pp. xxii., 133,
[86] Ibid., pp. xxv., xxviii. For details about Hitler’s conception of emotions, see Ibid., pp. xxv., 3.
[87] I refer again to Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939, p. 208. See also Pamela Swett, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d’Almeida, Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 6-7. For an introduction to related work on emotions in Nazi Germany, see “Emotions and National Socialism” in A Companion to Nazi Germany, ed. Baranowski Shelley, Armin Nolzen, and Claus-Christian Szejnmann(Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), pp. 399-412.
[88] Ibid.
[89] See Alexander Geppert, “‘Dear Adolf!’ Locating Love in Nazi Germany,” in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, ed. Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena and Alexander Geppert (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010).
[90] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 107. See also Mosse, Nazi Culture, pp. xxv., xxviii.-xxix.
[91] Quoted in Ibid., p. 12.
[92] Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933, p. 92.
[93] Walter Gropius, “The Intellectual Basis of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” in The Bauhaus, p. 77.
[94] Konrad Nonn, “The State Garbage Supplies. The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” in Ibid., pp 76-77.
[95] The school in the end was not demolished out of cost constraints. Quoted in Chairman of the City Council representatives Hofmann (NSDAP—National Socialist German Workers’ Party), “What Will Become of the Bauhaus?” in The Bauhaus, p. 177. See also Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, trans. John Batki (New York: CEU Press, 1995), p. 197.
[96] Another exception was László Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur [From Material to Architecture] published in 1929. For a recent English translation, see László Moholy-Nagy, From Material to Architecture, trans. Lars Müller (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2021).
[97] Paul Klee, “The Play of Forces in the Bauhaus,” in The Bauhaus, p. 50.
[98] Walter Gropius, “The Necessity of Commissioned Work for the Bauhaus,” in The Bauhaus, p. 51.
[99] Walter Gropis, “The Visibility of the Bauhaus Idea,” in Ibid.
[100] Gropius, “The Intellectual Basis of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” p. 77.
[101] Hannes Meyer, “Building,” in The Bauhaus, p. 153-154.
[102] Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933, p. 65.
[103] Quoted in Ibid., p. 94.
[104] “Swiss Architecture Student Writes to a Swiss Architect about the Bauhaus Dessau,” in The Bauhaus, p. 175.
[105] Carlo Enrico Rava, “I Svolta Pericolosa: Situazione dell’Italia di Fronte al Razionalismo Europeo,” Domus 37, January 1931.
[106] Giovanni Michelucci, “Contatti fra Architetture Antiche e Moderne,” Domus 51, March 1932.
[107] Irene de Guttry and Maria Paola Maino, “Forging Modern Italy: From Wrought Iron to Aluminum,” in Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945, ed. Wendy Kaplan (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 180. See also Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy: Visions of Utopia, 1900 – Present (London: Princeton, 2005), p. 68.
[108] A comprehensive biography of Ponti’s life and works has been completed by his daughter Lisa. See Lisa Licitra Ponti, Gio Ponti: The Complete Works 1923-1978 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990).
[109] “una prova magnifica delle energie italiane risuscitate dal Fascismo,” Fondazione La Triennale di Milano, Triennale Di Milano, p. 19.
[110] Thomas Dixon traces the opposition of rationality versus emotion to the ancient Stoics. See “Emotion” key word, p. 339.
[111] It must be recalled that these same negative forces themselves harnessed emotion to their end.
[112] “Suggestioni d’Architetture Moderne,” Gio Ponti, Domus 76, April 1934.