#books #architecture | International architecture

International architecture / edited by Walter Gropius.
Zurich: Lars Müller, 2019.
106 p. : il. + 1 hoja.
Serie: Bauhausbücher ; 1.
ISBN 9783037785843
/ EN / Libros / Arquitectura – Siglo XX / Bauhaus / Walter Gropius
ehuBiblioteka BCG A-72.036 INT
https://ehu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1099466392

[.en] When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1924, it was finally possible to publish the first of the Bauhausbücher that Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and Làszlò Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) had first conceived of in Weimar. The series was intended to give insight into the teachings of the Bauhaus and the possibilities it offered for incorporating modern design into everyday aspects of an ever-more-modern world. First in the series was Gropius’ International Architecture, an overview of the modern architecture of the mid-1920s and an early attempt to articulate what would come to be known as International Style architecture. In a brief preface, Gropius summarized the guiding principles he identified uniting the avant-garde around the world. But the real thrust of the book is visual, with an extensive illustrated section showing buildings in Europe and the Americas. According to Gropius, these illustrations show the “development of a consistent worldview” that dispensed with the prior decorative role of architecture and expressed itself in a new language of exactitude, functionality and geometry.

Published for the first time in English, this new edition of the first of the Bauhausbücher is accompanied by a brief scholarly commentary. Presented in a design true to Moholy-Nagy’s original, International Architecture offers readers the opportunity to explore the Bauhaus’ aesthetic and its place in the world as Gropius himself was trying to define them. 

Walter Gropius’ International Architecture (1925).
The Charnel-House, 2014-08-25
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/08/25/walter-gropius-international-architecture-1925/

The following translation of Walter Gropius’ International Architecture (1925) is adapted from Kenneth W. Kaiser’s 1964 translation for his thesis at MIT. It is, to date, the only translation of the brief text which accompanies the photos and plans featured in the volume. All the images and pages reproduced here come from scans uploaded over at the excellent Monoskop archive. Here’s the full-text PDF of Gropius’ groundbreaking Internationale Architektur.

Further on, directly after the translation, there’s the original German text. Quite short,though not quite Miesian in its brevity. Of course, Gropius openly admits that the book’s primary function was intended to be visual. Enjoy!

International Architecture
Walter Gropius. Bauhaus Books 1. Weimar, 1925

Foreword

‘International Architecture’ is a picture book of the modern art of building. It will in concise form give a survey of the works of the leading modern architects of the cultured countries of the world and make the developments of today’s architectural design familiar.

The works pictured on the following pages carry beside their differing individual and national characteristics, common features that are the same for all countries. This relationship, which every layman can observe, is a sign of great significance for the future, foretelling a general will-to-form of a fundamentally new kind represented in all the cultured countries. 

In the recent past the art of building sank into sentimental decorative conceptions of the aesthete,, whose goal was the outward display of motives, ornaments, and profiles taken mostly from past cultures, which were without essential importance to the body of the building. The building became depreciated as a carrier of superficial, dead decoration, instead of being a living organism. The indispensable connection with advancing technology (and its new materials and construction methods) was lost in this are many for each building problem — the creative artist, within the boundaries his time sets upon him, chooses according to his personal sensibilities. The work therefore carries the signature of its creator. But it is wrong to infer from this the necessity for emphasis on the individual at any cost. On the contrary, the will to develop a ‘unified’ world picture, the will which characterizes our age, presupposes the longing to liberate spiritual values from their confinement to the individual and to elevate them to ‘objective importance’. Then the unity of the arts, which leads to culture, will follow by itself. 

In modern architecture the objectification of the personal and the national is clearly recognizable. A uniformity of the character of modern buildings across natural borders, to which peoples and individuals remain bound, caused by world trade and technology is invading all cultured nations. Architecture is always national, also always individual, but of the three concentric circles — individual, people, humanity — the last and greatest encompasses the other two. Therefore the title: 

International architecture
Study of the photographs of this book will reveal that strict utilization of time, space, material, and money in industry and management decisively determine the factors of the physiognomy of the modern building-organism: exactly cut form, singleness in multiplicity, organization of all parts of the building for the functioning of the building complex, the street, and traffic, concentration on typical plan forms, their development and repetition. A new will is discernible, to design the buildings of our environment from inner laws, without lies or gaming, their sense and purpose elucidated by the functional tensions of their own building masses, with anything unnecessary that would mask their absolute form thrust off. The architects of this book affirm the contemporary world of the machine and its tempo; they strive for ever bolder means of design with which to overcome, with action and example, the suspended torpor of the world.