This series covers individual titles from the 14-volume Bauhausbücher collection from Lars Müller Publishers. More information on the books discussed and overall project can be found at the end of the article.
László Moholy-Nagy’s From Material to Architecture is the 14th book and final book in the Bauhausbücher series. Published in 1929, a year after his departure from the Bauhaus, it offers a comprehensive overview of the themes he explored as an artist and professor during his half-decade at the school, as well as insight into the holistic teaching approaches he developed alongside Walter Gropius. The book’s general trajectory follows that of its title, beginning with materials in their most basic form. It traces the history of sculpture from prehistoric cultures through more recent centuries and up to modernity, and differentiating older forms of sculpture based on the combination of basic shapes from a new “kinetic” model based on space, movement, and time. The book’s final section covers architecture, fulfilling Gropius’ view that it was the true end-subject of a Bauhaus education, as well as the medium best equipped to address the concerns of modern humanity.
The first two sections focus, respectively, on Moholy-Nagy’s general pedagogy and the “materials lab” approach for which the Bauhaus was known. This method of teaching saw first-year students given free reign to create experimental sculptural works that conveyed the visual and tactile qualities of materials including wood, metal, cloth, and leather. A broader examination of the four qualities of materials (structure, texture, facture, and accumulation/”heap”) follows. Of these, the greatest attention is given to the third, “facture”, which Moholy-Nagy expands to include not only the human “making” of structures, but those made by nature as well, taking particular inspiration from the scientist Raoul Heinrich Francé’s text Die Pflanze als Erfinder (“The Plant as Inventor”).
In its second half, the text moves from works created at the Bauhaus to a more international overview of modern sculpture, and by extension, architecture. This expansion of scope is accompanied by a broad selection of images, with dozens of examples of sculpture and architecture, including Moholy-Nagy’s own work and impressively realized pieces from his Bauhaus students, alongside an overwhelming selection of complementary images that range from microscopic photography and photonegatives to scenes of nature and industry.
At their best moments, the accompanying images build to a near-transcendental accumulation of imagery that evokes the timelessness in modernity; at other times, they have the somewhat overbearing feel of technology montages from mid-century educational films. As the number of images increases, the captions begin to grow longer and more involved, and with Moholy-Nagy’s somewhat perplexing practice of using only lowercase letters, the captions begin to take over as the book’s primary text. The ever-quickening pace of text-image alternation eventually takes on a film-like quality, corresponding to the ever-accelerating progression of materials into modernity set out in the book:
the route goes as follows:
• in painting: from colored pigment to light (colored light-play)
• in music: from instrumental tone to sphere sounds (ether-wave music)
• in poetry: from nationally bound, from event-bound language, from the constructing of thoughts and the constructing of emotions to unbound, absolute poetry.
• in architecture: from closed to open space, from bound interior space to absolute space.
The book as a whole, and especially in its first half, is marked by an expansive, utopian vision of the possibility of the individual mind when freed from the modern limitations of specialization, a position that even a century later feels as urgent as ever. (Perhaps less well-received for 21st century readers is Moholy-Nagy’s full-throated embrace of technology in the production of art, as well as his valorization of “primitive” cultures as paragons of non-specialization, which elicits a disclaimer from the book’s modern publisher in the accompanying materials.) The book would be the last in the 14-volume Bauhausbücher series, which had started its run only four years prior with his co-editor Gropius’ International Architecture. Dozens of forthcoming books that had been announced, including works by Le Corbusier, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and others would never be realized.
Like the greater Bauhaus project of which it was part, the Bauhausbücher project never suffered from lack of ambition. But from the beginning, the editors found it challenging to secure publishers, and with both editors resigning from the institution in 1928, the series could not be resurrected. While From Material to Architecture could be seen as a perhaps somewhat bittersweet coda given how much remained unrealized, the 14 books that did see the light of day stand as a remarkable document not just of an institution, but of a wide-ranging movement to interrogate, document, and celebrate modernity in all its forms.
From Material to Architecture
László Moholy-Nagy
Lars Müller Publishers
Hardcover, 244 pages, CHF 55.00
About the series:
The Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books) from Lars Müller Publishers are modern editions of books originally published from 1925-1930 by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, which served as both documentation and platform for the ideas behind the Bauhaus school. Originally planned as an ambitious 54-book collection, the series faced financial challenges, and after the editors’ departure from the Bauhaus, it was discontinued. Despite its reduced scope, the 14 volumes that were published stand as major works of design, architecture, and art theory by artists and thinkers whose work would define the following century, including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. The modern editions recreate the design, typography, and images of the originals with English translations, while correcting typographical and printing errors.
