The cloudlike exterior of the new
Kaplan Institute, designed by John Ronan, on IIT's campus in Chicago. Steve Hall
The Bauhaus in the Age of Frictionless Design
1.
ZACH MORTICE
MAR 14, 2019
The design school at Chicago’s IIT is a direct descendant of the
Bauhaus. Its slick new building is, in some ways, everything the Bauhaus was
not.
The Institute
of Design at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)
may be the most direct offspring of the Bauhaus, which was the most influential
design school in the world. Founded by former Bauhaus faculty member László
Moholy-Nagy in 1937, and later absorbed into IIT (whose architecture school was
then led by Mies van der Rohe, himself a former Bauhaus director), the graduate
school has had seven-plus decades to marinate in the context of early
20th-century experiments that forged art with industry.
And architecturally, it’s been an
exceedingly steady simmer—until now. Mies designed IIT’s campus, including the
famous steel-and-glass Crown Hall. The Institute of Design’s new
home, the 70,000-square-foot Ed Kaplan Family Institute for
Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, is the campus’s first new
academic building—by Mies or anyone else—in 40 years. It represents one of the
most pervasive and influential types of architectural space today. The building
looks, and functions, like a tech office, with break-out spaces, a communal kitchen,
acoustically swaddled furniture, and staircase seating. The Institute of Design
shares the $37 million facility with IIT’s entrepreneurship and maker hub.
Staircase seating in the
bright-white new Kaplan Institute. (Steve Hall)
Like many tech offices, the building
is open-plan, but with spaces for group huddles and private concentration.
(Daniel Chichester)
Walk into the Kaplan Institute, and
the first thing you’ll notice is how bright and pristine it is. The white
walls, floors, and ceiling are a counterpoint to the dour brick and black steel
of Mies’ ultra-minimalist campus. The original Bauhaus was obsessed with
materiality, delving into how each material expresses its fundamental nature,
whether ceramic, fabric, metal, or paper. But the materials at hand today are
much different. “We define material to be data,” said Denis Weil, the
institute’s dean.
The old Bauhaus was as obsessed with
new technology as these designers are today, but in the 1920s, that meant
welding glass with steel. Today, it means virtual, digital products. Much of
the school’s output, then, is not tea kettles or chairs, but apps and other
feats of computer programming.
After graduation, Weil says, most
students will work in innovation consulting with large consultancies, as
front-end designers with tech firms, or in traditional UX design. And this
transition from corporeal to digital drives the formal expression of the
building.
The original Bauhaus was obsessed
with materiality. “We define material to be data,” said Denis Weil, the
institute’s dean.
On a tour, Weil showed off past and
current projects at the school, and their wild diversity would have delighted
the Bauhaus founders, given their own push to break down barriers between
industrial production, artisanal craftsmanship, and experimental art. One
project he pointed to used audio greeting cards to help police explain Miranda
Rights in Spanish. Another was an attempt to elicit more energy-efficient
behavior by apartment tenants. This is design that’s about making strategic
interventions to change human behavior, rather than offering up widgets to make
problems disappear.
Germany’s Bauhaus was run on a more
cloistered studio-based model, where masters would create alongside
apprentices, away from the distractions of the world. The infrastructure
required for those studios (looms for textiles, kilns for pottery) encouraged
more physical separation, as opposed to the institute’s current digital-heavy
scrum.
“The studio comes from a time where
we felt that designers need to withdraw, and that the power comes out of the
vision of the designer,” said Weil. “That’s not at all how design happens today
... if the designer’s role is [that] of the integrator and facilitator, it
makes sense to have a studio as a place where you interact—hence the
open-office concept.”
The Kaplan building is not a temple
of holy creation, but a conference room for sorting and crowd-sourcing the best
ideas. There’s a public-to-private spectrum of spaces, from shielded chairs for
solitary work to grand forums. Most space is in-between, with moveable walls
and bump-outs for conversation among a handful of people. The building is
filled with colorful furniture and writeable dry-erase walls. Its
architect, John Ronan, wanted it to be friendlier than the
typical Miesian architecture on campus.
“I wanted to use materials that were
not available to Mies,” said Ronan, who teaches at IIT’s architecture school.
That meant an ETFE façade system. ETFE (or ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) is an
ultra-strong and lightweight polymer, and Ronan used it to cover the center’s
second floor. Three balloon-like sections make up the semi-opaque walls. A
pneumatic system automatically inflates and deflates chambers of the ETFE to
block excess light on sunny days or let more light in when it’s overcast.
The ETFE wall on the building’s
second floor modulates daylight and glare. (Zach Mortice)
As the second floor cantilevers out
over the glass-walled first floor, comparison to a cloud is unavoidable. The
design products of the school migrate to the cloud and the building turns into
one—albeit a cloud that’s been poured into rectilinear, factory-stamped mold.
But the first-floor machine shop, filled with 3D printers, routers, and laser
cutters, is a clue that physical objects do still have a place here.
Despite the digital focus, not all
of the school’s products are immaterial. (Daniel Chichester)
The halls of the early Bauhaus were
wilder than these quiet corridors, with avant-garde dances and parties. For a
metal-themed Bauhaus party, for instance, “Invitations suggested that gentlemen
come as an egg-whisk, a pepper-mill or a can-opener, while ideas for the women
included a diving bell, a bolt or wing-nut, or a radioactive substance.” One of
the Bauhaus’s earliest sages was the robed mystic Johannes Itten, a devotee of an obscure
neo-Zoroastrian, racist religious sect called Mazdaznan, who began
each class with controlled breathing exercises. And then there’s the
photo of dark-haired female Bauhaus
students messily coiffed in the style of the Cure’s Robert Smith, which
offers something timeless about outsider self-expression.
”The mystical-robe stuff is
completely gone,” said Jeffrey Mau, an instructor at the Institute of Design
who focuses on the history of the Bauhaus. Today, “You won’t find too many
art-school kids with blue hair and tattoos. Everybody looks like they’re in
business school.” Which makes sense, because some are (the Institute of Design
offers a dual MBA degree).
But the tidiness isn’t totally
antithetical to the Bauhaus in its prime. The Bauhaus’s second director, Hannes
Meyer, nurtured the school to profitability through commercial
partnerships, according to the New York Times. Its
most profitable product was wallpaper, as Architect magazine
pointed out.
At the Institute of Design
post-Mies, Jay Doblin, who became director in 1955, sought professionalization,
adding theory and critique to what had been a largely experiential field of
master-and-apprentice craft. Under Doblin, faculty put more emphasis on
business-friendly new product development and less on open-ended
experimentation.
That legacy is reflected in the
spotless, tidy condition of the Kaplan Institute. “There’s still a janitor
walking around cleaning scuff marks off the floor with a tennis ball on a
stick,” said Mau. “It sets a tone of, ‘Where can I spread my work out and leave
it?’”
This is partly due to how new the
building is—things could change. The building is made from tough and resilient
materials (polished concrete, exposed fireproofing) that should be able to
absorb some creatively channeled destruction. “I imagine it’ll look quite
different in a year or two,” said Ronan. “It’s not a precious thing. It’s meant
to be a working space that can get messy. It’s a canvas for the students to
finish with their work.”
The Bauhaus was never a purist
organization, but through most of its brief history there was room for art. At
the Kaplan building, this space seems to have largely been filled by
“innovation.” It’s in the building’s name and serves as an implicit mission
statement. By moving its emphasis from experimentation to innovation, the
school narrows its scope from holistically using design as a tool of
self-expression to using it as a tool for technocratic managers. That, too, is
a measure of the Bauhaus’s influence, which has been absorbed and re-interpreted
through the day’s economic value system.
The best art and design schools are
those that can take the bumps and scratches that come with an endless parade of
young minds carrying bizarre and messy ideas, and it remains to be seen if the
precise and tidy Kaplan Institute will be called into action this way, and if
so, how it will bear the smudges. Its writeable walls are so far mostly filled
with lecture talking points and assignment due dates. It doesn’t feel like a
place to scribble yet.