SASSOON ARCHITECTURE

‘Bauhaus’ utopian vision to change society in the aftermath of the First World War

Modernism to Postmodernism

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a ‘total’ work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

The school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 andLudwig Mies van derRohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime.The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled, by the Nazi regime. Tel Aviv, in fact, in 2004 was named to the list of world heritage sites by the UN due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture; it had some 4,000 Bauhaus buildings erected from 1933 on.One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs (“initial” or “preliminary course”) was taught; this is the modern day “Basic Design” course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural and design schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.

The White City

The White City of Tel Aviv (Hebrew: העיר הלבנה‎, Ha-Ir HaLevana) refers to a collection of over 4,000 Bauhaus or International style buildings built in Tel Aviv from the 1930s by German Jewish architects who immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine after the rise of the Nazis. Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in this style of any city in the world. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed Tel Aviv’s White City aWorld Cultural Heritage site, as “an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century.”

http://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/

PIET MONDRIAN

Yves Saint Laurent dress tribute to Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian-(1872-1944)
Pieter Cornelis “Piet” Mondriaan, was a Dutch painter and a follower of the Bauhaus.  HE was also an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.

Mondrian’s paintings are not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one might expect. Brush strokes are evident throughout, although they are subtle, and the artist appears to have used different techniques for the various elements.The black lines are the flattest elements, with the least amount of depth. The colored forms have the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one direction. Most interesting, however, are the white forms, which clearly have been painted in layers, using brush strokes running in different directions. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms, as though they are overwhelming the lines and the colors, which indeed they were, as Mondrian’s paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space.His art and theory influenced the Bauhaus movement and the development of the International style in architecture. In 1940 he settled in New York City.

http://www.mondriantrust.com/

SASSOON HAIR DESIGN

FORM EVER FOLLOWS FUNCTION

 Showing Sassoon Creative Team members Mark Hayes, Bruce Masefield, Peter Dawson and Edward Darley and how the Sassoon philosophy comes to live in Sassoon Professional. This is Sassoon this is Hair Design.

The original wording was “form ever follows function.” It is also routinely misattributed, mostly to 20th-century modernist grandees, like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but was actually coined by the less famous American architect, Louis Sullivan. Misused though Sullivan’s quote has been, his point, that the style of architecture should reflect its purpose, made sense at the time, and continued to do so for much of the last century, not just for buildings, but objects too.

Chicago, we love you. Not only do you have architectural boat tours, skyscrapers and public art galore, you hosted what was probably the best World’s Fair and your art museum supports architecture, too.

The Art Institute of Chicago just opened a small photography show this weekend featuring the architectural photographs of John Szarkowski, Aaron Siskind, and Richard Nickel, who all worked during the 1950s, shooting the buildings of the late, great Louis Sullivan.

Demonstrating the role that the three held in maintaining Sullivan’s legend for modern audiences — then attracted the Modernism (capital “M”) so prevalent in the mid-century — the curators outline a thesis as follows:

In the 1950s, the photographers John Szarkowski, Aaron Siskind, and Richard Nickel embarked on in-depth photographic explorations of structures designed by the renowned architect Louis Sullivan, whose commercial buildings and theaters of the 1880s and early 1890s broke with historical precedents, displaying a radical, organic fusion of formal and functional elements. Attracted to Sullivan’s renegade American spirit and uncompromising values, Szarkowski, Siskind, and Nickel also found inspiration in the play of light over his ornamented facades and the dynamism of his buildings within the bustling city of Chicago. The interest of these photographers came at a critical moment, when many of Sullivan’s most important structures were being threatened with demolition in the service of urban renewal; their photographs illustrated the fragile existence