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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

> it remains a symbol of a modern approach to architecture and design.

As if that's a good thing. I see someone else has already referenced "From Bauhaus to Our House."

The bottom line is just this: Bauhaus is ugly. It does not uplift people's spirits and it does not make us happy. The authors inadvertently give the best argument against it:

> Many also believed that only dedicated craftsman, with their hands-on approach, could produce the highest quality work. They argued that machine production inevitably led to a decline in aesthetic quality. Furthermore, they contended that individuals surrounded by such unattractive surroundings lacked an appreciation for beauty.

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You probably don't know how utterly dysfunctional for example a typical kitchen looked before Bauhaus. See Magarete Schütte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen

The cliché Bauhaus style people know is not the thing that had the impact, everything else was.

That itself says it was a designed kitchen for a particular use case.

And it incorporates things like varying countertop heights, etc.

Looks workable to me - remember kitchens were not "open concept" at the time, nor made for multiple people operating in them at once.

I think atoav was crediting Bauhaus with the modern kitchen, with the Frankfurt Kitchen as an early success story.

Which is both fair and faintly damning, as what has been lost along the way (functional design that makes good use of limited space) was perhaps more important than the clean lines and shiny veneer which was retained.

Or maybe I'm just projecting. Been cooking on glass-topped stoves for the past few months and that tends to make me irritable.

Is that supposed to be a good or bad kitchen? It looks hard to move around in, but the colors are nice.

It's a amazing kitchen. This isn't V8 suburbia, where garages are bigger than what an entire working class family or two lived in in interwar Europe.

No I don't think you understand: before that kitchens generally looked very different and were much more dysfunctional. The reason you don't find it very spectacular from a 2024 perspective is because that kitchen design was so successful it changed how kitchens looked after it. So you will certainly find better (but also worse) kitchens today, but that kitchen design had a ton of impact on how things are looking today.

Before that the typical kitchen furniture were single freestanding objects, like this stove: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Fr...

But it is more than surface, Schütte-Lihotzky went and measured how long certain tasks were taking and optimized the layout and objects of the kitchen to minimize the waste of time, aomething that before that wasn't really a thing in residential kitchens.

I'm not an architect or anything, and I think Bauhaus looks awesome. And sure I wish we could all live in perfect craftsman houses painstakingly put together with a hammer and nails but that's not realistic.

My idea of a perfect house involves post-and-beam construction with no nails at all and only traditional joinery :)

Although I know a guy who takes down really old buildings and regularly sees hand-wrought nails, those are cool too

Do you mean traditional Japanese joinery? Because for sure the traditional western joinery involved nails.

Mortise and tenon. Found all over the world, some of the earliest examples are in europe

You also have whatever it is using pegs - https://yankeebarnhomes.com/2017/12/14/post-beam-vs-timber-f...

Though that may be just a variation of mortise and tenon.

If will check it out, thanks! Until now I was not aware of anything like that outside Japan.

False choice. It's not "my way or insane expense."

Love that book. Tom Wolfe's dry wit is a joy.

However the modernism originating with bauhaus can be applied tactfully with enhanced functionality (I.e larger unobstructed spaces- but in limited fashion. Too often it strips the humanity away from our spaces.

A stunning example of such modernism: Aarhus City Hall, Denmark

Bauhaus is kind of fun and cool-- even playful. I totally disagree that it's depressing.

The problem is also nowadays the decoration, ornamental or pictures could be machined into wall elements quiet chiefly. Imagine a house with walls of family history moments. Today bauhaus is mostly a symbol of the terror rule of the economic over the aestetic and the suppression of individualism in architecture.

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