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Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/292359
with things that are more than things: emissaries of value and values, aesthetic and otherwise. The Bauhaus, coming some thirty years after Voysey had developed his definitive style, is often misunderstood as an institution exclusively exalting function over form. But that is only one strand of its history. At the time of its founding in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919 there was another tendency afoot which can only be described as spiritual. "The most pronounced spiritual ideology…flourished around [Johannes] Itten, the priestly artist whom Gropius recruited to teach the school's famous Vorkurs foundation course" writes Ben Davis. In Wassily Kandinsky's classes "students were tasked with uncovering supposedly natural harmonies between shapes and colors." The Bauhaus, in 1923, with a showcase titled by Gropius "Art and Technology—A New Unity" would turn resolutely towards industrial design and mass production, but its early, quasi- mystical bent infused some of its most memorable applied art objects, notably one by Marcel Breuer—later known for his designs in tubular steel--the "African" or "Romantic" chair, with textile by Gunta Stolzl, of 1921. To divorce design from ideals—spiritual, aesthetic or even political--is to gut it of its purpose. Whether a chair is mass- produced from tubular steel, or painstakingly handcrafted of wood and weaving, the impulse underlying its design and making is the same: to create something which, through both beauty and utility, enhances the lives of the people who use it. The Bauhaus did not decry decoration; on the contrary, the opening words of its 1919 Manifesto declare, "The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building! To embellish buildings was once the noblest function of HYLAND