The Groove Issue 22 - Four Great Ideas From The Post-Pandemic School That Changed The World
Welcome to the 22nd issue of The Groove.
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FOUR GREAT IDEAS FROM THE POST-PANDEMIC SCHOOL THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Now that there is more or less of a plan to roll out a vaccine, we are wondering what a post-pandemic life will look like and how a “new normal” will be for interactions, businesses, and relationships to flourish again.
We don’t know yet how the world will change, but I think that there has never been a better time for entrepreneurs and artists, as well as for people in organizations, to come up with new ideas, products, services and much needed radically different business models in many industries.
Break Up With The Old
Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus on a stroll through the Hansaviertel in Berlin in 1961. Gropius was one of the master architects of the Hansaviertel
Since history reinvents itself with various guises, it’s only fair to look back to the origins of one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in the history of art, architecture and design. Conceived in the precarious Germany of 1918, when the effects of WWI were felt in every corner of this planet and the Spanish Flu was decimating the world population, architect Walter Gropius had just been released from military service when he saw all the destruction and despair around him, and in a flash of insight it dawned on him that “the old stuff was out”.
Gropius asked himself: “What can I do to create a new movement? Something different that breaks with the past, that is utilitarian, simple and that encompasses all the arts in one?” What an ambitious premise, yet, how important it is for people to come up with ideas that have a foot in the future, charter unexplored territories, and leave behind a heavy past that brought nothing but the sensation of being stuck.
Embrace A Multidisciplinary Approach
A staircase in the 1911 building designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde that was the site of the original Bauhaus. Today, it is the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
With these revolutionary ideas in mind, in 1919 Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany, a movement at the intersection of art, design and architecture, grounded in “comprehensive artwork” type of thinking. Gropius’ constant focus was on the process of rebuilding. He was always considering the union of art and functional design to bring beauty and mass production to everyday objects.
Professors and students had the same objective, and Bauhaus became a place of argument, debate, and creation. Some of the teachers Gropius was able to recruit included Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Wassily Kandinsky. Bauhaus as a physical school didn’t last long, as the Nazis dismantled it in 1933, but its theories and practices are as alive now as they were one hundred years ago.
During WWII, Gropius had to move out of Germany, first to London and later to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was made chairman of the department, a post he held until his retirement in 1952.
Form Follows Function and Generates Efficiencies
The office of Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, the institution’s first home when it was established in 1919. The desk, armchair, sofa and ceiling lamp were originally by Gropius, the table lamp is by Wilhelm Wagenfeld and the carpet is by Benita Koch-Otte. The room was reconstructed by Gerhard Oschmann in 1999.
What’s most exciting about Bauhaus and Gropius’s legacy is that its impact extends to art, architecture, and design, and the business aspect of it as well. One of Gropius’ maxims, which was completely new at the time, was that “every element of design has to serve a purpose” - emphasizing that nothing unnecessary was needed in Bauhaus.
This is exactly what inspired Steve Jobs to conceive the iPod and later the iPhone. In 1981 he attended the International Design Conference in Aspen, and there he learned about the spare and functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus. After that first discovery, he never let that idea go. He started publicly talking about it in 1983 when in another design conference he said how Apple’s product would always be “clean and simple” and “shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality.”
Steeped in the “nothing unnecessary” mindset, Jobs pushed his team to pursue a design where objectives were accomplished with the minimum number of steps, from the use of products to the customer experience at the Apple stores. It isn’t a coincidence either that for the design of the Apple stores, Jobs hired architect Im Pei, who had been Gropius’ student at Harvard and followed the same aesthetic sensibilities of the Bauhaus School.
Make it So Simple But So Significant That It Has Mass Appeal
From top clockwise, a sample of Bauhaus designs: Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer, doorknob by Walter Gropius, nesting tables by Josef Albers, Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich
But the influence of Bauhaus on Apple isn’t an isolated example of how their principles continue generating revenues today. Architects all over the world have built and continue to build houses, office buildings, cultural centers and even significant parts of cities, such as Tel Aviv, which is home to more than 4,000 Bauhaus-inspired constructions.
And all the mid-century modern furniture stores owe its merchandise style to Bauhaus, to the extent that almost all of them still sell some version of the same pieces designed by Breuer, Albers or van der Rohe, whether they are the authorized ones or cheap knockoffs.
IKEA, for example, is the largest user of the Bauhaus School’s art in their designs. That is also the reason for its massive success: the brand became synonymous with simple and beautiful products born out of the ideas of Gropius. In 2020, the IKEA brand was valued at approximately $19.5 billion.
What is it that this world in front of us needs? Is the post-pandemic universe ready to welcome new and revolutionary ideas? Is it a slower world? Is it a migration out of cities and the development of new work/live spaces? What kind of functional design do people want? I ask myself these questions all the time and I’d be thrilled to bounce ideas with you should you want to share some.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.