由於Charles Jencks 先生的著作和地景作品不少，所以要討論他一生的成就，比較難全面考量，然而還是可寫些感想、感謝。
他的著作有再版的特色，再版的情形可能改動、增益頗多，如 Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, (The Monacelli Press, 2000)， 這本的初版是Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture [HUP， Charles Jencks 1973，王錦堂老師有翻譯本] ，篇幅增加近倍。
一般讀者也不容易了解Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture 一書中的"the Tragic View of Architecture"是何意思，所以連書名都改了。
我就是根據Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, 一書的分期，增加強調Le Corbusier 的《東方壯遊記》，來作漢清講堂的Le Corbusier七講。
Charles Alexander Jencks (born June 21, 1939; dead October 13, 2019) is a cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie's Cancer Care Centres. He has published over thirty books and became ...
Architect Charles Jencks on the Bauhaus — what is its legacy 100 years on? The movement brought together the most creative team of artists and designers that crossed paths in the 20th century
FT Charles Jencks JANUARY 4, 2019
How do we regard the Bauhaus on its 100th anniversary? Born in the German crisis of 1919, it is arguably the epitome of Modernism, the cultural moment that coalesced after the world war when creative elites, artists and foot soldiers, among others, agreed the old order was finished. Founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, the school offered an ideology that could weave together the disunited threads of modernity. In this sense, the Bauhaus became more than a style and the leading design school of the 1920s. It’s a candidate as one of the great modern institutions, marked by an iconic building. The familiar Bauhaus image as a dynamic machine might not be to everyone’s taste, nor is some of the art it produced over the 14 years of its existence. Yet across the century no real competitor has emerged as the institution of Modernism, to give this world view a capital letter. The Bauhaus also had the sociological reality of Modernity — class freedoms, free love, fashion-madness and individual competition — and the third component, Modernisation. This was the creative expression of contemporary technology and industry, mass production as art.
Those three Ms came together in a doctrinal drive and the spiritual fury of debate. The Bauhauslers passionately followed values of Modernism that went back to the 1800s: from William Morris and John Ruskin, the importance of craft; from reformers the promise of a utopian society; from artists the primacy of the imagination; from technologists the inventive use of new materials, and so on. Such values competed under Gropius. His first Bauhaus manifesto captures the idealism that appealed as much to defeated soldiers as to disoriented youth. “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts . . . let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without class distinctions . . . which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
The image accompanying this proclamation, by the artist Lyonel Feininger, shows the Bauhaus cathedral reaching to the heavens. Three cosmic stars crown three crystal towers with dynamic Christian starbursts. Towers of light stream upwards, an architecture of light adapted from crystal buildings of the 1910s, an idea later employed by Albert Speer for Nazi rallies, whose searchlight columns in the sky were another first for modernised politics.
One youth group attracted to the Bauhaus was the Wandervögel, the “wandering birds”, the hippies of that time. Like their 1960s counterparts they returned to nature for its primal lessons, but nonconformity created local problems. To returning soldiers and the people of Weimar, these characters danced around too much and smelled of garlic. Yet they found common cause with three other groups: the no-nonsense Marxists who wanted a social revolution, the Dadaists who would come and go from Berlin, and the mystical Expressionists led by Johannes Itten.
Thus in Weimar’s Bauhaus at least five sects jostled under the peacemaker Gropius, and this creative energy attracted top artists, among them Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer. The mood veered between Dada antics and Weimar high culture. One Christmas Day Gropius dressed up as Santa Claus and, according to Gunta Stölzl, who led the weaving workshop, “served every single person present personally. A kind of washing of the disciples’ feet.”
From 1919 to 1923, serious creative play was the reigning spirit, but it’s important to stress the flowering of Modernism in a burst of post-Christian zeal. For instance, the polemicist Bruno Taut, the leading prophet of Expressionist architecture, initiated the “Utopian Correspondences”. These so-called Glass Chain letters were sent between utopian designers, each of whom adopted pen-names symbolising their persona. One was “Anfang” (Beginning); “Prometheus” was the architect Finsterlin who could warp any boring building into a viscous shape. Gropius was named “Mass”, signifying moderation, proportion and measure.
A portent. His industrialised Fagus Factory of 1914 had predicted a frank functionalism but with highly faceted glass walls (crystals of the right-angled sort). It might be termed Measured Expressionism, but there was nothing moderate about his fervent attack, along the Glass Chain, on a dull desiccated function. Along with the Bauhaus manifestos, Gropius’ panegyric to the imagination is without equal.
“But who of those living at this time, cursed as it is with functionalism, does still understand the all-embracing and cheering character of architecture . . . The grey, empty, obtuse stupidities in which we live will bear humiliating evidence to posterity of the spiritual abyss into which our generation has slid . . . Return to the crafts . . . build in fantasy without regard for technical difficulties. To have the gift of imagination is more important than all technology.”
Amen to this spiritual origin of the early Bauhaus, with its echoes of Nietzschean willpower. Ironically, the first building the Bauhauslers crafted together was not a crystal cathedral but a timber-crystal built for an enlightened patron, the Sommerfeld log-house. The invitation to the opening showed the triangular prisms exploding up to the heavens, but now in dark rays of timber. Although very little Expressionist architecture was built by this time, London’s Crystal Palace of 1851 had led botanic gardens around the world to the same basic mineral metaphor, and by the 1920s the movement was termed Late Expressionism. When it comes to revivification, the zeitgeist is supremely adept.
In 1922 the mystic Itten, who invented the Bauhaus’s Preliminary Course — a year’s basic training undertaken by all students — taught along with Kandinsky, who had invented abstraction as the spiritual in art, and Klee, whose playful imagination insisted that students combine the opposites, chaos and cosmos. The heady swing between emotion and science was mandatory. Thus the Sommerfeld log-villa was built by Bauhaus masters and students who hand-crafted the ornamented wood as if they were Gothic brethren working in harmony, as masons from the lodge — the word Bauhaus means building lodge.
Inevitably all this high art and craft was attacked by sceptics and other kinds of artist. The Dutch polemicist Theo van Doesburg set up his stall in a Weimar pub, boasting that he had overturned the Bauhaus and “infused the poison of the new spirit everywhere”. His and Mondrian’s venom was called De Stijl. Le Corbusier also injected his L’Esprit Nouveau into the student body and the zeitgeist started to spin in a minimalist direction, towards reductivism and what Le Corbusier dubbed the vacuum-cleaning school of architecture. Gropius apparently threatened students who listened to van Doesburg with expulsion.
Following the zeitgeist in 1923, Gropius switched official policy, designed his Bauhaus office in the Dutch De Stijl, proclaimed a new manifesto entitled “Art and Technology: a New Unity”, fired Itten and installed a more rationalist artist as Master of the Preliminary Course. By 1926, the new style of the century had been christened by Le Corbusier, and its leading exemplar constructed in Dessau. It was a real crystal cathedral, but with a machine aesthetic and flat top. Most people called it simply Modern Architecture or the International Style, though Gropius continued to deny it had anything to do with one mode or another. Rather it was universal or, as he wrote, the “total scope” of architecture. When I interviewed the designer Marcel Breuer in the 1970s about this possible flip-flop in direction, he said van Doesburg had no influence: the party line has held for 100 years.
How do we gauge Gropius’ right-angle turn of mind to rationalism? In the first manifesto his stirring words had demanded no compromise — “build in fantasy without regard for technical difficulties” — but the second proclaimed art and technology as “a new unity”. Was it just old opportunism, or something deeper? Most of the Bauhaus artists were angry, saying art could not be reduced to technology, or industry to fine art. But architects looking to mass production were delighted. Gropius could point back to his Fagus Factory and explain that he was just being a realist. Many could claim the spirit of the age, including the upcoming Nazis, and the zeitgeist had moved towards a minimalist classicism (what became known as Reactionary Modernism). Were Expressionists, organicists, the spiritually motivated, Dadaists and those resisting mass cultures simply out of fashion?
One solution to the conundrum is to understand how both spirituality and Expressionism could suddenly be seen as industrialised cubes. Thus, Le Corbusier repeated a mantra in his 1923 bible of Modernism, Towards a New Architecture: “A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. There exists a mass of work conceived in the new spirit; it is to be met with particularly in industrial production.” De Stijl and the machine aesthetic were the new spirits that the Theosophists and Mondrian proclaimed could be read in simple, white forms; not just crystals. Possibly Gropius saw no compromise in his volte-face, as he explained many times and to me, because his underlying spirit was universal. Looked at through his eyes such a defence is at least logical.
In 1925 Gropius moved the Bauhaus from Weimar, where the growing Nazi power was a threat, to Dessau. In 1928 he resigned the directorship to Hannes Meyer; two years later Mies van der Rohe stepped in as director, with another personality war and another change of direction. The next move took the institution to Berlin, where by 1933 the pressure of the Nazis and Bauhaus Masters forced Mies to close it. He, like so many of the Bauhauslers, emigrated — and all took with them to the US, or across Europe, their precepts and ideals.
Gropius’ later bargains with power — writing letters to Goebbels defending the new architecture as Germanic, designing the Reichsbank in 1934, building the Pan Am Building on the most congested spot in New York, attacking Playboy architecture then designing the Playboy Club in London — were simply hypocritical. The postmodern movement starts in reaction against such compromise. However, in defence of Gropius, remember his better self: how he brought together the most creative team of artists, designers, students and characters that crossed paths in the 20th century, gathered them in one small fractious place, and managed to keep the Bauhaus bubbling on for eight years — an unparalleled achievement.
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Walter Gropius in 1930 © Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
'Kathedrale’ by Lyonel Feininger (1919)
The Fagus Factory building by Walter Gropius © 12/UIG/Getty Images
Paul Klee in his Bauhaus Studio in 1924
Postcard for the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar by Herbert Bayer (1923)
Josef Albers in 1928
Wassily Club Chair B3 by Marcel Breuer (1925)
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