From Our House To Bauhaus - Occupy Modernity
In 1981 a publication entitled From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe raised a lot of attention for his polemics on the tyranny of modernist and postmodernist architecture. Despite the publication´s simplifying critique and trickle down effects on the mainstream understanding of modern architecture, in her The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History of 1986, Linda Hutcheon takes Tom Wolfe´s writing against the modernist hegemony as both “a negative aesthetic response to what he amusingly calls ‘the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & sparseness & of it all’ ”, and “an ideological rejection of what can only be called the modernist architect’s “policing” of the impulses of both the clients and the tenants of the buildings.”
Thirty years later Hutcheon´s account, “That all architects know that, by their art´s very nature as the shaper of public space, the act of designing and building is an unavoidably social act.” is still contested and at stake.
The wallpaper From Our House to Bauhaus – Occupy Modernity, is an image-essay that takes the `grid´ of Wolfe’s published arguments simply illustrated by various architectural images as background.
In this case, meaning is not produced through text with its supportive imagery — but made by 23 images of one building – the recently contested urban site of New York University´s Silver Towers Housing Compound – which touches both the grounds of Wolfe’s critique and the critique of his argument.
To recall the potential of Modernism and its architecture, its relation to the city and the ways we want to live, but this time enacted and understood by its inhabitants – the public at large.
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981)
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History (New York: Telos,1986)