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Comment by snowpid | Hacker News Reader

It is worth to note, that more architects love the design than the average German. There is a huge district in the south of Berlin called Gropiusstadt (designed by Walter Gropius) which is so unpopular that only lower class people live there. While pre Bauhaus buildings are very popular in Germany. Bauhaus and its predecessors is more a problem than a solution.

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Might be controversial, but in my opinion the impact (and long-lasting aesthetic) of Bauhaus is much more visible in the industrial design of modern products than it is in architecture.

After all, a consumer product can win by individual choice of the consumer, with failed attempts of interpreting Bauhaus design disappearing again, which makes it easy to cite good examples of lasting Bauhaus style over time (i.e. showing similarity of Braun products with Apple design, etc.).

But a failed interpretation of Bauhaus in Architecture continues to live among us for decades, watering down the value of well-executed Bauhaus design with an appearance of being a cheap bland building...

Every Chipotle in America is part of the Bauhaus lineage. Wildly common, if not "popular."

For anyone that wants to read a critical take of Bauhaus and modernist architecture in general, check out the very funny From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House

His other book on art was pretty good too, and both were received very poorly by their respective industries, which is probably a sign that he was on to something.

I'd argue that this has nothing to do with Bauhaus because this district was planned to have 90% social housing. Of course cramping 30k+ low income workers (or unemployed people) into a small space is going to cause trouble.

And if I remember correctly the original plans were changed and the buildings ended up much higher and denser to meet the goals of the city.

Edit: Found this article which states that the plans were modified by Wils Ebert, Gropius had no say in this. https://www.goethe.de/ins/au/en/kul/arc/bau/21319032.html

I still see my point standing that modern architecture is very unpopular in Germany.

Brutalism (which generally most/many people seem to dislike) isn't the same as Bauhaus though.

> modern architecture is very unpopular in Germany

IMHO it has much more to do with the constraints of the 50s and 60s. All major cities in Germany were destroyed and had to be rebuilt fast and cheap. Of course buildings from the late 19th/early 20th century might have looked a lot nicer but they were also massively more expensive (would you rather many cheap and ugly high density buildings or a few better looking expensive ones, it's not like there were that many other options).

Many, many, many, many of pre WWI buildings were constrained by budget and had poor inhabitants. Today they are very popular (and nobody poor can afford it anymore)

Where I live it was a close call between rebuilding in modern layouts (car-friendly and that entire "block in a park landscape" approach that I consider the biggest failure of 20th century architecture, nobody likes these "parks" that are too close to buildings to feel public and too open to feel private) and rebuilding in the old layout, with houses on the edge of the street enclosing hidden backyards, roof lines closely matching pre-war roof lines.

Old layout won and today everybody is very happy about that. But wherever there are old stock buildings and post war reconstruction buildings in the same street, the old ones are considered much higher standard, despite best efforts to avoid modernism in the reconstruction. From today's perspective, the actual age difference between one group and the other is laughably small. But in the rush to rebuild post war, the "good enough" threshold was so much lower than pre WWI the difference echoes on through the renovations to this day.

Because labour was cheap and plenty, when they were built with hand with bricks. Also some survivorship bias, as many badly build ones, did not survive the bombs so well.

After WW2 it was mainly cheap concrete.

I am from Germany and your point is valid. Older buildings are preferred because the alternative is those build in the 50s fast and cheap.

But it’s untrue that only rich people live in old buildings. Maybe in some parts. But most old buildings are in the poorer regions of the inner city. Most rich people I know live in modern buildings. Some in older but very well remade ones…

Gropiusstadt isn't exactly the best example of Bauhaus though. IIRC Gropius original plan was changed a lot to maximize capacity/minimize cost, the buildings were only supposed to have 5 stories or less etc. I don't think those issues have anything to do with the the specific style.

> so unpopular that only lower class people live there.

Sounds like Bauhaus was better at building affordable housing than other styles.

Siemensstadt seemed pretty nice.

Those ambitious Weimar era housing estates in Berlin are all awesome, with their careful balance between efficiency and preventing excessive cookie-cutter.

It's interesting to contrast them with their less modernist "Gemeindebau" contemporaries in Vienna, which share some ideas and contrast in many others. In my opinion the Vienna ones deserve far more attention than they get (than they get outside Vienna?). I guess their biggest hindrance to fame is that there are so many of them, and that the biggest ones that unsurprisingly draw all the attention (e.g. the match made in heaven of Karl Marx Hof and George Washington Hof) aren't quite as interesting as their entirety, in particular the continuity through Anschluss, war and the aftermath.

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