2008-05-18

Happy birthday Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus.
Along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of "modern" architecture.


It's really fascinating that the same geography gave birth to the two opposite, yet both powerful ways of thinking, Nazism and Bauhaus, almost simultaneously.

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This reminds me what Kofi Annan (United Nations Secretary General), said in 2006 about religion:
"If there is a problem, it is not with the faith, but the faithful. It is not the text, it is the way we interpret it."
(As a Secretary General you don't expect him to say "Dogma of anykind kills you guys!", do you?)

Faith at that era, roughly speaking, was the perfect machine. The radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the miracle of mass production.

Both faithfuls Nazis and Bauhaus believed in the same thing.
Nazis seeking perfection in racism, and mass production in creating mindless citizens through propagandizing.
Bauhaus on the other hand, working on reconciling art/ individuality with mass production and seeking perfection in the relationship of usefulness and beauty.

Same faith, different faithful huh?
The rest is history. We've desperately tried to figure out what to do with the perfect machine till we nuked each other.
(I bet the guy who invented toothbrush, poked his buddy's eye out with it first!)

Anyway..
Happy birthday Walt! We love you!
Wish you could see us downloading individual ringtones to our mass produced cell phones, manufactured by the perfect machine we call chinese cheap labor!

1 comment:

  1. Very interesting perspective on your blog, good to see such vision is still out amongst populace.

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