Taking Sides: Bauhaus vs the Arts and Crafts movement

reading a dire book that keeps wittering on about the bauhaus and their big idea of 'erasing the distinction between art and life', which is pretty fatuous, but on the other hand not totally unlike yer william morris types four decades earlier.

one of these movements is somewhat more fashionable than the other among politcally naive art and design students, though. what's up with that?

Bauhaus gets extra credit among as you say "politically naive art & design students" for being declared degenerate by the hitler-fascists? I like both styles enough but my ideal book about either would just be loads of pictures without any commentary other than bare details - designer name/date/location, stuff like that.

Actually, did bauhaus get the full "degenerate art" treatment from the nazis, I can't remember, it;s been a long time since I read about it all.

Arts and Crafts is something your grandmother could love, whereas Bauhuas would strike her as cold/sterile, etc ("ugh, I hate modern stuff..."). Hipsters don't want to have the same taste as granny.

Arts and Crafts created much more liveable houses, I think. Little Craftsmen houses with front porches and tiny upstairs bedrooms that you can find all over Seattle- really nice. Good for that "art as daily life" kind of thing, as they feel very warm and approchable. I have a vague feeling that Bauhaus didn't do too much residential work- is that totally wrong? I always think of big concrete and glass structures.

My favourite Bauhaus 'machine for living in' is the Isokon flats in North London, managed by Notting Hill Housing Trust:

http://www.c20society.org.uk/images/casework/lawn_rd.jpg

Originally designed for and lived in by single artists and expatriate Mitteleuropeans.

In the absence of a thread about art deco buildings, I will use this thread.

These are all buildings near where I live.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3124/3190295563_3457135768.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3487/3187027021_d9622101e0.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3432/3187027013_5058be3d20.jpg

I want to live in one of the row of little art deco houses in the second picture. Very few of them have been cared for properly. One has brown double glazed windows and doors, yuck.

And then moving into more purely modernist stuff...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3297/3187027009_758ed3f462.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3350/3187764469_150ce0d0ac.jpg

I've been watching a lot of Jonathan Meades on YouTube. One of his best shows is the one about garden cities, in which he argues that at the start of the C20th, when cities were expanding, the English had the chance to embrace modernism (cities = great), but blew it by awarding contracts for new towns to adherents of art & crafts (cities = evil) thereby ruining domestic architecture evermore

i don't really understand that. england is and was much more 'urban' in character than most of the 'main' countries of modernism -- france, italy, russia, even germany. not having lived in either a new town or in a modernist utopia, i'm not sure what i'm meant to despise in english domestic architecture/admire in, uh, wherever. thinking about it that gropius guy designed a school round the way, and it's fine. it's a school.

(imo modernism doesn't exist but that's another question, maybe.)

Is the Arts & Crafts movement when people would make macrame plantholders, and set pieces of driftwood around & call them art?

ie the middle-class 1970s?

late 19th early 20th C movement often just called "craftsman" when referring to arch. (in the US)

I've been swooning over A&C everything since early childhood, maybe I'm secretly a granny? The sad thing is that in the '80s that shit was CHEAP, like Stickley pieces at yard sales "cheap", for serious. Nobody wanted it.

I like that you are a secret granny

I like my buildings and furniture bauhaus and my shirts arts and crafts.