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The Brutalist is about an architect who studied at the Bauhaus. Its protagonist is fictional, but the Bauhaus was real. What was it? The most influential design school in history. So, from fonts to furniture, this is how Bauhaus created the aesthetic of the modern world...
During the 19th century architecture, art, and design were all about the past. This was the age of Revivalism — everything was built or designed in historical styles. And it was also a maximalist age: decoration, detail, colour, and ornamentation were in fashion.
The first rebellion against Revivalism was Art Nouveau — literally "New Art" in French. It emerged in Belgium in the 1890s and soon took over the world. This was a new style not chained to the past, a luxurious aesthetic defined by flowing lines and natural forms.
But, by the end of WWI, Art Nouveau was finished. A new movement rose up to take its place: Art Deco. Gone were the flowing curves. This was an aesthetic of straight lines, bold angles, and machine-like geometry — futuristic, decadent, dramatic, exciting.
But the days of Art Deco were numbered. The world was changing: industrialisation, globalisation, rising populations, and constant new inventions... electricity, cars, radio, cinema, reinforced conrete, and so much more. Could the old ways of design adapt to this new world?
Well, back in the early 1900s a radical architect called Adolf Loos had been causing trouble in Vienna. He designed buildings without any ornamentation whatsoever — absolutely clean and stripped back. And in 1910 he delivered a lecture called "Ornament and Crime", saying this:
Loos realised that new technologies were dragging the world into an era of standardisation. When people make things by hand they instinctively decorate them — and we had been making literally everything by hand since the dawn of civilisation. The opposite of standardised.
But this tradition belonged to a world of artisans and craftsmen — not one of machines. In other words: Art Nouveau and Art Deco design were not suitable for mass-production. Hence Loos argued for the use of pure and unornamented materials instead.
Loos influenced a generation of others who were, like him, anxious to find a new aesthetic adapted to the Industrial World. One of them was a Swiss called Le Corbusier, who went on to become the most influential architect of the 20th century. He said this about Art Deco...
There was also the Bauhaus, a design school set up in Germany in 1919. Walter Gropius was its leader and other members included the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. Their campus in Dessau, designed by Gropius and opened in 1926, embodies their beliefs.
The Bauhaus' goal was to find an aesthetic suited to mass-production and standardisation, not only in architecture but across all design, from furniture to fonts. Thus they used steel, plastic, and board instead of the stained glass, bronze, and hardwood of Nouveau or Deco.
There was beauty in clean surfaces and unornamented materials, as Loos said — and the Bauhaus proved it. They created simple and functional objects with tubular steel, board, and plastic, whether chairs or lamps or chess sets. A sleek, thrillingly modern, industrial aesthetic.
The world is now filled with minimalism, plastic, and chrome — but once upon a time it wasn't. Something like this doorhandle, designed by Walter Gropius, looks like our standard modern aesthetic. But at the time this sort of thing was, strange as it sounds, revolutionary.
In 1922 a competition was held to design the Tribune Tower in Chicago. A Neo-Gothic design by Raymond Hood won — a sign of the times. But unsuccessful designs submitted by Loos, Gropius, and several other aspiring modernists were a sign of things to come.
The first architectural test of this new movement was an exhibition held in Stuttgart in 1927. Its aim was to show that modern architecture could provide cheap, healthy, and high quality housing for workers. Gropius and Breuer, along with Le Corbusier, designed houses for it.
To us, in 2025, the Weissenhof Estate looks utterly ordinary — but that is precisely because Bauhaus was so influential. Still, if they were outsiders and radicals in the 1920s, an age dominated by Art Deco and the final stages of Revivalism, how did they change the world?
The flashpoint was WWII — and the rise of Nazism. In 1933 the Nazi regime shut down the Bauhaus, accusing them of degeneracy and communist leanings. So they fled — taking their ideas with them — eventually arriving in the USA, where Gropius, Mies, and Breuer all settled.
After the war the world needed to both rebuild and accomodate the growing global population... but how? Bauhaus had already found a solution. Using concrete and steel and glass, absolutely functional and unornamented, we could build quickly and cheaply and at scale.
And so by the 1950s Bauhaus architecture (known as the "International Style") had conquered the world. It's hard to imagine how exciting and futuristic this style must have seemed at first, standing out among cities filled with the creaking and cluttered stone buildings of old.
So the Bauhaus triumph was several decades in the making; but, in the end, it was unstoppable. They sensed the future and created a minimalist, functionalist, industrial aesthetic for it — the aesthetic of our modern world, whether of crockery or skyscrapers or anything else.
