2019_4_257-400_Symmetry-Culture-and-Science

Symmetry: Culture and Science Vol. 30, No. 3, 257-400, 2019 https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_4 BAUHAUS 100: SYMMETRIES AND PROPORTIONS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION Guest editor: Vilmos Katona A thematic issue

SYMMETRY: CULTURE AND SCIENCE is the journal of and is published by the Symmetrion, http://symmetry.hu/. Edition is backed by the Executive Board and the Advisory Board (http://journal-scs.symmetry.hu/editorial-boards/) of the International Symmetry Association. The views expressed are those of individual authors, and not necessarily shared by the boards and the editor. Editor: György Darvas Any correspondence should be addressed to: Symmetrion Mailing address: Symmetrion c/o G. Darvas, 29 Eötvös St., Budapest, H-1067 Hungary Phone: +36-1-302-6965 E-mail: [email protected] http://journal-scs.symmetry.hu CrossRef service is sponsored by the University Library and Archives of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Annual subscription: € 120.00, € 90.00, Normal € 60.00, Individual members of ISA please contact the Symmetrion. Student Members of ISA Institutional Members Online subscription: http://journal-scs.symmetry.hu/subscription/. Account: Symmetrology Foundation, IBAN: HU24 1040 5004 5048 5557 4953 1021, SWIFT: OKHBHUHB, K&H Bank, 20 Arany J. St., Budapest, H-1051. © Symmetrion. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. ISSN 0865-4824 – print version ISSN 2226-1877 – electronic version Cover layout: Günter Schmitz; Image on the front cover: László Moholy-Nagy: Composition, 1922-1923 (paper collage on paper, Santa Barbara Museum of Art); Images on the back cover: Anikó Robitz: Paris Montmartre, 2011 (top); Nizhny Novgorod, 2015 (bottom); Ambigram on the back cover: Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Symmetry: The journal of the Symmetrion Editor: György Darvas Volume 30, Number 4, 257-400, 2019 Bauhaus 100 CONTENTS EDITORIAL Vilmos Katona 261 SYMMETRY: ART AND SCIENCE  Shaping — and shaped by — infinity: The importance of hunches, 265 Peter Magyar  Message of a world-changing utopia: Semantic aspects of the artistic 275 language of the Bauhaus, Zsófia Francsicsné Szántay  Architectural education in Hungary from 1928 to 1948 according to the 295 contemporary specialised press, Rita Karácsony, Zorán Vukoszávlyev 313  Space syntax analysis of a modern villa in Budapest, Attila Kurucz, Anna 331 Losonczi, Dániel Szabó, Barbara Keszei, Andrea Dúll 339  Paul Klee and the spiritual tradition, Tamás Meggyesi  The coming of heaven on earth and the Bauhaus, Katalin Máthé APPENDIX  White city: A collection of modernist buildings from Tel Aviv, Éva Lovra 359

260 CONTENTS GALLERY  Geometry in the culture of the XX-XXI centuries. Towards the centenary of the Bauhaus, Curators: Vitaly Patsyukov and Zsuzsa Dárdai 373

Symmetry: Culture and Science Vol. 30, No. 4, 261-263, 2019 https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_4_261 EDITORIAL BAUHAUS 100: SYMMETRIES AND PROPORTIONS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION The architects’ community is now celebrating the first centenary of Bauhaus. The famous design school of post-World War I Germany combined crafts with the fine arts, heralding a new architectural paradigm for modern life. Based on pure geometry and functionalism, it relied upon a scientific approach to re-create the human environment, to liberate the same from historical allusions, and to redefine culture as a product of rational thinking. Bauhaus changed the structure of the education of applied arts, and placed architectural master planning at the hub of all major specializations. However, those specializations were each progressive actualizations of traditional crafts due to the needs of industrialized construction. Materials were processed and objects were fashioned accordingly in the Werkstatts of the old campus at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, then in the southern wing of the new school in Dessau. Light penetrating through the great curtain wall of the new building was an achievement that presaged the age of transparency. The connection between matter and structural concept was a key attribute of the thinking of Bauhaus architects. Their education started with elemental theoretical and material studies, which then progressed to skilful knowledge in the design of building elements, furniture and articles of personal use. Experimental objects and sets first exhibited in the Haus am Horn Ausstellungs were effective attempts to change the ordinary lifestyle of early 20th-century families into a better way of living, to cut down the costs of construction, to free the space from useless complication, and to let in more light. Consequently, these efforts also contributed to the spread of prefabricated elements, and

262 V. KATONA boosted mass production, causing a fracture between Bauhaus masters propagating and opposing it (i.e., the argument between Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten). Whatever modernity derived from Bauhaus, the complexity of its education was rooted in the artistic aspect of Gesamtkunstwerk, the ideal of the “comprehensive artwork” originally popularized in the context of the 19th-century German opera. Indeed, the modernist architectural school created its own theatre in both a literal and figurative sense. The former remained in small circles of self-designed eurhythmy, while the latter has changed the surface of our planet. The ‘crystal cathedral’ proclaimed by Walter Gropius is not part of our future anymore, but the vision behind the average metropolises of the advanced world. Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building became the new archetype for modern skyscrapers — not because of its laconic functionality, but because of its composition and dramatized, sometimes incongruent, industrial style that spoke more genuinely to the public through its visible structural elements than any ornamental façade could. Modernism to Bauhaus was initially a different concept and behaviour of living under the aegis of the old Europe, yet it became a broadly generalized architectural language in America’s wide-open spaces. Philip Johnson referred to it as the International Style, and categorized its features in order to give a simple guide to the nouvelle design — ironically, he later altered his style to post-modernism. His guide, though, is an important source to us, since Johnson described one of the characteristics of modern composition as a genuine play between the adaptation and the violation of symmetry. If he was right, then either the early Bauhaus or late neo-modernist compositions share the same principles. The commemorative architectural issue of Symmetry: Culture and Science welcomed papers with different approaches focusing on symmetries and proportions in modern architectural composition. We expected studies either on the semiotics of the “international” architectural language, its role and metamorphosis over time, or the structural, psychological, sociological effects of the modern use of symmetry in architecture. Studies considering the impact of modern composition on architectural education were also welcome. Historical studies about the Staatliches Bauhaus, its institution, work methods, communications and human network were employed to re-

EDITORIAL 263 introduce symmetry in a different light. Contemporary critiques and re-formularizations of Bauhaus compositional principles were appreciated as well. A speciality of our current issue is that most of our authors are from Hungary, which is unprecedented in Symmetry’s history. The reason for this choice, beyond all randomness of the accepted papers, is that our community wants to commemorate the relatively great amount of Hungarian Bauhauslers, most notably Marcel Breuer, Alfréd Forbát, Farkas Molnár and László Moholy-Nagy, all of whom played key roles in the development of the Modern Movement throughout the world. In the appendix, we also would like to invite attention to the White City (Tel Aviv), where Bauhaus took root and thrived to such a degree that its architecture became an integral part of the landscape. I need to say special thanks to James Reese for his invaluable contribution to setting these insightful articles into English. Vilmos Katona



Symmetry: Culture and Science Vol. 30, No. 4, 265-273, 2019 https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_4_265 SHAPING — AND SHAPED BY — INFINITY: THE IMPORTANCE OF HUNCHES Peter Magyar* * College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Kansas State University, 2097 Seaton Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: This study and research proposal includes two discreet areas. The first proposes to view a generally applied activity, architectural design, from a completely new angle. We will accomplish this objective by focusing on that rather neglected element, the surface, and subjecting it to a topological transformation, through which one could also quantitatively analyze space and our built environment. The second aspect belongs more to the hunches and observations, and investigates the probability of the hoped-for outcomes, while looking for methods and directions for the extension of the accepted capacity of architecture. Keywords: contemporary architecture, architectural theory, drawing, surface, continuity of surface, topology 1 MANIFESTO “On this day, the first of July, 2015, the undersigned, following in the unfading footsteps of my fellow countrymen, at the ‘hallowed’ site of the Bauhaus, very humbly forwards these observations: Experiencing the tangible aspects of modern architecture, the foundations of which have been established by the concerted spirits of individuals, forming the Institution of the Bauhaus;

266 P. MAGYAR Feeling the absence of the intangible idea, which from ancient times accompanied the perceptible physical reality, creating with it the mythical complexity and the mystery of the place; Obtained from a visual testimony, developed with the rigorous process of the Spaceprint method, where repeated protocols resulted in replicable outcomes, meaning that the results can be deemed true and valid; Using the architectural example of the great German architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel; I hereby bequeath the seed of an idea, which could occupy the yet missing element of the mythology of space, and proclaim that: Architecture is the root of infinity.” Once it is understood that even the simplest building has an intimate and mostly hidden relationship to infinity (Magyar, 2016), architects can become the new priests and shamans of our society, since they continue what their awed predecessors were doing: speaking to and with cosmos, and recording its incomprehensibly magnificent presence. After a few years, in the Centennial of the Bauhaus, writing an account of my more than fifty years in architecture, and prefacing the research, as summarized in the abstract above, I found it entertaining, but also important, to include those enthusiastic lines written just two years before my eightieth birthday. Today, two years after that day, I still nurture this idea from decades ago, from our Nigerian years in the late seventies. Let me explain. 2 BETWEEN SOLID AND VOID The first condition of spatial continuity is surface continuity. We could easily imagine the surface as an independent cognitive entity, part of both Space and Nonspace, Spirit and Matter. We can then subject this epidermis to a topological transformation, which keeps only the surface continuity and the neighborhood-relations; measurement, proportion and direction is not in its repertoire. The result is the Topologically Equivalent Model, which I baptized as the General Spaceprint (GSP) (Magyar, 1986). The original surface formation was named the Particular Spaceprint (PSP). This possesses the same shape as its ancestor, but looks like if termites consumed the inside material, leaving untouched

SHAPING — AND SHAPED BY — INFINITY 267 just the paint on the structures (the termites will have an important role later in this text). The GSP’s main characteristic is that the rooms and the internal spaces are depicted as bubbles, while the doors, windows and other openings (between the rooms themselves and between the rooms and the outside surface of the building) appear as tubes (Fig. 1- 2). Figures 1-2: “Spaceprints”, or embracing space with a continuous folded surface.

268 P. MAGYAR If in our imagination we remove the glass and other coverings of the openings of our buildings, then the infinite space can enter without any obstacles into the interiors. This continuous relationship is represented by the surface continuity of the ground, the surface of the Earth, the outer skin of the building, and through the ‘tubes’, all the inside rooms (Fig. 3). This usually very complex construct is the spatial structure of the building. Is not it very curious that while we architects always speak about space, what we are actually doing is shaping the non-space? This thought-process, interestingly enough, for the first time ever, deals with the essence of architectural space. Making a musical parallel, it takes on the role of the musical notation system (Magyar, 1988; 1989). Figure 3: “Space-neurons” (Magyar, 2016). We can avoid the complex depiction of the GSP by drawing the spatial structure in a simplified way. This would be the image of the Simplified General Spaceprint (SGSP) (Fig. 4). In this instant the upper — stretched out — ‘horizontal’ surface, which stands for the continuous surface of the earth, and the ‘outside’ of the building, is drawn with a long line. Into this long line join the tubes, represented also with a single line, coming from the bubbles; yes, also just shorter ‘horizontal’ lines. Usually, due to the complexities involved, one draws this diagram first, before the — in some cases — infinitely complex ‘bubble diagram’ (the GSP) is constructed. I make a big assumption when I imagine that all of my colleagues in the field of education hate that other bubble diagram, which students usually make to outline the connectedness of spaces in a building. (The reason

SHAPING — AND SHAPED BY — INFINITY 269 of my antagonism is that, sometimes, or even most of the times, the floor plans will be the squared-off version of the former.) Figure 4: Simplified General Spaceprint (SGSP) of a building. Figure 5: Mathematical symbols representing architecture in a cosmic scale. Talking about outline of a building, these Simplified General Space-prints could serve as a very good tool for programming and defining the spatial structure in a single diagram (cf. Magyar, 1999; 2019). We mentioned complexity several times as a nature of the spatial structure of a building. One building! Now imagine several buildings, and many of them tall ones. Obviously, it is very easy to imagine these multiple GSPs, as a root field. We can do a GSP diagram from any building, as each has one. We could speak then

270 P. MAGYAR of low, medium, super and hyper-density root-fields. Therefore, the earlier ‘manifested’ statement seems to be visually verified, and in shorthand we can apply these mathematical symbols to represent architecture, now as connected to, and representing of cosmos (Fig. 5). The Importance of hunches comes to the forefront, following the sequence of the abstract. A long time ago, a circulated research proposal of mine had used the abbreviation: “I.D.E.A.” It stood for Interface Dependent Enhanced Awareness. As a sequel to this and to the previously discussed material, the introduction of another definition is necessary. This definition is the topological isomorphism, which is based on a comparison between the original shape (PSP) and the shape of its topologically equivalent model (GSP). Two basic geometrical formations, the sphere and the torus, will help us illustrating our thesis. Both are the prime examples of the similarities mentioned before. However, their differences are what I am going to use in my argument. They can act upon on an object, without endangering its wholeness, before it falls apart. In this case the number of the sphere is zero (any cuts through it results in two pieces). This same number of the torus is one. Now imagine the human body. The GSP of it is similar to the sphere. If, however, we put together our hands, like in the cultural gesture of praying, then we can be likened to the topology of the torus. In other words, we increased our genus number from zero to one. If we take the posture of the people of the Muslim faith, they (also) kneel down, and with their head and hands, they touch the earth. Obviously, beyond other meanings, the genus number of their topological configuration is even higher. Not to speak about the possible significance, that the surface of their body now is connected to the surface of the Earth, and through it, to the cosmos — I owe you one more item, my earlier reference to the termites. Maurice Maeterlinck (1939), in his book, The Life of the White Ant, writes about the termites (even we now know, that the termites do not belong to the biological group of ants). His observation was that all the individual members, removed far from their nest, immediately return on an order, transmitted with a so far undiscovered means, if an enemy attacks their home. During our stay in Africa, we have seen many of these nests, sometimes called castles. Through some unfortunate occurrences, when they were fully or partially destroyed, I became convinced that these constructs are maybe the best manifestations of topological isomorphism. Maeterlinck repeatedly mentions the ‘occult qualities’ of these nests, the ‘communal soul’ of a termite castle! I doubt that we could ever know how this

SHAPING — AND SHAPED BY — INFINITY 271 aforementioned remote-communication happens, but these three examples, related to heightened genus numbers, and related topological isomorphism cases made me to meditate on the architectural applicability of these phenomena. In the following phase of this proposed research, we have to step out of the boundaries of the orthodox science, and believing in the verifiable results of the science of para- psychology, we would need to employ the services of so called ‘sensitives’. These individuals seemingly possess a ‘sixth sense’ and are often called ‘clairvoyants’, due to their ability to foretell certain events. To measure and verify their ‘gift’ a special card, the “Zener Card” (Fig. 6) is used. The scores above and below the statistical averages are the significant ones. To apply the talents of these individuals, we need to do two steps in advance: the ‘easiest’ one is to search for and find an existing building, whose topological properties are close to the case of topological isomorphism (such would have been, while it was still intact, the stone-wreath of Stonehenge.) Figure 6: Zener Cards. Another, pricier, but maybe more efficient way would be to design and build such a building, following such rules of topology. In both cases the ‘scores’ of the participating ‘sensitives’ would be compared to the outcomes conducted in so called control buildings, which were devoid of those topological qualities. The financial investment into this research is by far outweighed by the expected outcomes, like those fictionalized accounts of Atlantis which featured buildings that healed illnesses (healing buildings), buildings in which the capacity for learning was multiplied (teaching buildings), where the creative ability was enhanced (artist buildings), where future events were easy to foretell, and so on. All these could be easily dismissed as belonging to the category of sci-fi literature, if only a famous scientist, Jean Piaget, had not — indirectly — verified them with his research.

272 P. MAGYAR With hundreds of very young (two- to five-years old) children, he conducted research about their spatial perception, and discovered that our perceptional system works according to topological rules (Fidelman, 1990; 1995). That is, topology is one of our genetic abilities, even if we are not aware of it. It is very tempting, so I add another cultural myth, which is thousands of years old. It relates to the Taihu stone in China. Many still believe that the stone, coming from the depth of a lake with similar name, is the condenser of chi, the ‘force of life’ (Wah Nan, 1982). It was not a big surprise for me to learn, that with its infinite complexity of topological structure (like the termite castle), it is another prime example of topological isomorphism (Magyar, 2013). ‘Hunches’, much less obvious, were the root case (no pun intended) of many great inventions, without which we could not live today. So, I am risking failure in order to follow up and develop the case of applied topological research, and hope that I will succeed. 3 ARS POETICA Working at the boundaries of the known, the unknown and the unknowable, I prioritize the two latter notions. I intend to excavate the preconscious from the subconscious strata. My tools are my pen and lately the stylus (for drawing on digital tablets). The material starting point is the epidermis of the place, but from there one has to ascend to the rarefied spheres of thoughts and even feelings. This floating in the domains of the unknown and unknowable, unfortunately, during the design process and as the straight consequence of the same, shifts more and more towards the domain of the known, and in the constructed reality, every unknown must be excluded. My process drawings aim to serve the prolongation of the floating phase, and interrogate that hope, whether the materialized reality could convey anything at all from the Icarean gift, as provided by the design experience from its enthusiastic laborer.1 1 See more at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhxytTozjHE . This shows the logic through which the method of the above listed thought processes were developed. Accessed: 04.12.19.

SHAPING — AND SHAPED BY — INFINITY 273 REFERENCES Fidelman, U. (1990) Creative cerebral asymmetry. Symmetry: Culture and Science, 1, 2, 195–204. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_1990_2_195 Fidelman, U. (1995) Teaching experiments as evidence for the hemispheric paradigm. Symmetry: Culture and Science, 6, 2, 210–213. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_1995_2_210 Maeterlinck, M. (1939) The Life of the White Ant. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Magyar, P. (1986) Spaceprints, Auburn, Ala.: Auburn University Press. Magyar, P. (1988) Construction Meditative, Auburn, Ala.: Auburn University Press. Magyar, P. (1989) Scattered Instances of Structure and Time, Auburn, Ala.: Auburn University Press. Magyar, P. (1999) Thought Palaces, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press. Magyar, P. (2013) Seven Lessons on Architectural Morphogenesis, Bloomington, Ind.: Trafford Publishing. Magyar, P. (2016) Palladian Space-Neurons and Other Roots of Infinity, Atlanta, Ga.: LitFire Publishing. Magyar, P. (2019) Linear Thought-Condensation, Novato, Calif.: ORO Editions. Wah Nan, C. (1982) The Art of Chinese Garden. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.



Symmetry: Culture and Science Vol. 30, No. 4, 275-293, 2019 https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_4_275 MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA: SEMANTIC ASPECTS OF THE ARTISTIC LANGUAGE OF THE BAUHAUS Zsófia Francsicsné Szántay* * Department of Public Building Design, Faculty of Architecture, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 3. Műegyetem rakpart, Budapest, H-1111, Hungary. E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: The conceptual revolution of the turn of the century intended to recreate both man and the manifestation of his vision of reality, art, giving them a new beginning and inventing a new set of signs and mythology. The ideal craftsman-artist lived a new way of life and conveyed a liberated meaning of artistic creation through the unified language of art. The aim of this paper is to reveal the message of the Bauhaus utopia through its three transpositions to different media: the text of the Bauhaus Manifesto, the visual grammar of the graphic arts by Kandinsky and Klee, and the architectural language of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau. We take a special focus on the grammatical rules and higher order symmetry of the artistic compositions. Keywords: art theory, art history, semantics, architecture, Bauhaus. 1 INTRODUCTION “On or about December 1910 human character changed”, notes Virginia Woolf (1924, p. 4) in her famous essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. From time to time the recurring desire and ultimate goal of revolution and novelty reach the Zeitgeist of mankind creating the thousand faces of utopia. Utopia is not only the imagined realm of an ideal society and ideal place, but also a manifestation of a certain range of ideologies that depicts and answers the current issues of an era. Furthermore, it is a special genre to communicate

276 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY these all. For art represents the way people experience the world around them, and a tool as well to express critiques and ideas to change reality; it goes hand in hand with utopia in the troubled times of humanity. The conceptual revolution of the turn of the century intended to recreate both man and the manifestation of his vision of reality, art, giving them a new beginning from tabula rasa, inventing a new set of signs and mythology. The aim of this paper is to reveal the message of the Bauhaus utopia and its set of signs through its three transpositions to different media: (i) Gropius’ text of the Bauhaus Manifesto; (ii) the visual grammar of the graphic arts through the theories of Kandinsky and Klee; and (iii) the architectural language of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau. The method of our analysis is to take utopia as a central notion to describe the language of art of the modernist era, in order to experience a special history. First, we describe the ideology and semiotics of the modernist movement and highlight some evidence that the message of the Bauhaus is an idealistic, expressly utopian thought. Second, we introduce the linguistic characteristics of the utopian verbal utterances, using the school’s original ideological source. Third, we trace the message through the textbook of Kandinsky and Klee, taking a glance at the painting New Harmony, while elaborating further the study of the relationship between semiotics and the Bauhaus ideas. Finally, we look at the tools of the visual expressions turning into three dimensions in Gropius’ school. We take a special focus on the appearance of the compositional principle of symmetry within the textual, visual and architectural grammar of the Bauhaus and highlight the message of this code throughout the different genres of art. We claim that the same utopian thought can be traced throughout the verbal, graphic and architectural artistic representations and that all the three ‘languages’ have a close interrelation with each other regarding their sets of signs and their semiotic rules and principles. 2 THE MESSAGE OF UTOPIA 2.1 The notions of utopia We will end up with architecture — hence let us start with the human! In all utopias there is a strong and clear relation between man and architecture. Talking about the diverse notions of utopia, at least two different definitions arise: the textual utopia and utopism. The former is a literary genre linked to that famous work of Thomas More, Utopia. For the culture anthropologist Françoise Choay, the book of Morus is an ‘instaurator’ work of literature. It sets the structure of a new genre that consists of three connected parts: the

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 277 critics of the era, the description of the model space and the model society (Choay, 1980). It is important to note that the object of utopia is always the built space, but it constantly works as a tool to sustain the life of a new, better society. On the other hand, utopism is a certain way of thinking, an approach towards the real world. As the philosopher Tamás Molnár points out, it is also an outcome of a critical mentality, and it can always be traced back to an existing, intolerable state that is general and affects a large portion of the society. Then somebody works out a theory in order to heal the harmful situation, but as this focuses solely on the causes of the state, it becomes abstract and remains only slightly coherent with the totality of human nature. The first apparently rational solution adheres to a belief, a blind faith. That is the point when an ideology becomes a utopia. Utopism also has its own characteristics and mental typologies: it goes hand in hand with an urge to end the old ways and to change human life right here and right now. Utopism is never patient — it gazes upon the ultimate harmonious endpoint, the ideal state, but leaves no time for the peaceful transition of the society. It is always universal, the best solution for everyone regardless of gender, race or personal character, and it creates a new man, with new mental, often new physical attributes. In order to still link somehow this new race to humanity, and to the ancient times, a mythic harmonious state of mankind that is far away in space and time is put on a pedestal (Molnár, 1993). Taking either reading of the notion, utopia always starts with man to heal his problems, to change his character and way of life and to create an ideal state that is sustained by a new kind of built environment. 2.2 Modern man and modern meaning As Peter Conrad points out, at the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century humankind promised that the world will be created all over again and a massive de- traditionalization process began. Turning towards forms, a new man was born even in his appearance: actress Louise Brooks had her hair cut in the ever after famous ‘bob’ style, and Johannes Itten, the Bauhaus instructor, shaved his head and “fashioned a plain monkish smock for himself, with a high collar … (and) wore spare, rimless spectacles” (Conrad, 1998, pp. 13–15). Taking the perspective of John Jervis, the modern is both a project, an experience and a representation. Project, as the modern man takes a “rational purposive control of the environment”, from our viewpoint, and creates a new, utopian model space in which to live. It is an experience to the extent that it involves various, unique impressions, the mix of the visions of bright lights and emblematic moments of city life — speed, fashion, street culture — an exciting, utopian lifestyle. Finally, modern is a representation: the challenge is taken to grasp modernity in consciousness, to picture it through imagery or language — it has its own ways to communicate its message through

278 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY art. The modern culture became filled with symbols, objects and images, such as the machine, air travel, film, and skyscrapers that all possess an iconic status of being the signifiers of the modern (Jervis,1998). On the other hand, Jervis (1998, p. 11) highlights that modernity seems to suffer from the ‘weight of the representation’ at the same time. There are no simple, reductionist explanations to this sign-system; it is hard to ‘read’ the modern world in its confusing multiplicity. Taking either the sociological or the aesthetic viewpoint, contradiction, ambiguity and contingency are central features of the Zeitgeist of the era (De la Fuente, 2011). Călinescu (1987, p. 42) claims that the bourgeois idea of modernity went hand in hand with a faith in progress, reason and the beneficial outcome of science and technology, while the “other modernity, the one that was to bring into being the avant- gardes, was from its beginnings inclined toward radical anti-bourgeois attitude”. Regarding modern architecture this ambivalent character also appears: are buildings soulless containers and is the quality of life really elevated by this kind of a-contextual built environment? These paradoxes can be traced back to the fact that the new flow of transportation, information and economic exchange deprived social life from fixed temporal-spatial coordinates (Giddens, 1994). Parallelly, the ideological dynamics of modernity, the urge for tabula rasa, emptied time and space of any fixed content or reference. Hence, modern art depicts that time and space are only conventions, and the representations have no longer fixed referents (Friedland and Boden, 1994). The search for a new meaning shaped the forms, expressions and the languages of the different genres of art, of which the modern movement created a kind of synthesis. Taking a short glance at the music of the turn of the century, we can find some composers who deliberately wrote music that reflects the changing world. Not only was the rhythm simply new, but it was qualitatively different. Besides that, it became faster, it unexpectedly delayed or even stopped, it mixed syncopation, irregularity and new percussive textures, hence giving the impression of the hurry and unpredictability of the modern lifestyle (Kern, 1983). Twentieth century rhythm was asymmetrical, uneven, “an analogue for the basso ostinato of industrial machinery and the different tempos of urban life” (De La Fuente, 2011, p. 20). This parallel to the essence of life of the era was so vivid that T.S. Elliot (1921) found Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring capturing the barbaric sounds of the modern city. The discontinuity with the traditional compositions and conventional meanings also appeared in the field of the visual arts, which we will render later more precisely. Summarising the introduced various formal manifestations of the ideas of the modern movement, at the turn of the century a well-articulated opposition was

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 279 experienced with the old ways (cf. Somogyi, Balázs and Dúll, 2019) and a utopian ideology was formed, creating a new man, a new life and as a consequence, a new set of signs. Thus, a rupture emerged with the former conventional meanings, and this conscious distancing can be traced in the ideology underlying the different genres of art and science, creating a special relation of the era to semiotics and semantics. 3 THE MESSAGE OF THE BAUHAUS THROUGH VERBAL LANGUAGE Turning towards the communicated ideology and program of the Bauhaus (Gropius, 1995), we claim that as a part of the modern movement it also presents many of the described characteristics of utopia in both senses of the notion. Taking our first source to study the message of the Bauhaus, we analyse the manifesto of the movement, first focusing on its history and content, then its linguistic-stylistic features. The Bauhaus school was institutionally founded through the fusion of the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts and the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in 1919. Another manifesto-like text, Gropius’ What is Architecture? preceded the founding manifesto of the Staatliches Bauhaus with only a few weeks. It was a statement for the Exhibition for Unknown Architects organised by the Arbeitsrat für Kunst artists’ trade union in April 1919. The theme of the exhibition was simply ‘utopia’ — clearly central motif of the era. This former short manifesto is striking in message, the main idea of the Bauhaus, the principle of unifying art, craft and technology is even completed with the quasi-religious image of the ‘lord of art’, the messiah architect of the future, who ‘will build gardens out of deserts and pile up wonders to the sky’ (Gropius, 2011). The text of the manifesto of the Staatliches Bauhaus is segmented into four paragraphs, with the central ideas of (i) a new way of seeing to understand the composite character of the building, (ii) the return of art schools to the workshops, (iii) the artist as an exalted artisan, and (iv) the guild of the united craftsman. The manifesto points to an ideal and harmonious endpoint of the united arts when all artists meet in architecture. The critique of the present renders an era when the spirit of architecture is lost, where art schools function incorrectly and where a barrier is maintained by divisive class pretensions between the artists and the craftsmen. We can find the motif of the tabula rasa in the new way of seeing and in the creation of the new building. The tool to reach this state is the return to the old times, to a world of the workshops. The new man of the manifesto is therefore the new craftsman artist, and his new guild even has its own symbol, the new building. The critics of the era, new man, the new built environment, and the motives of

280 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY unification, universality, collectivism, tabula rasa, ideal past state, the religious faith and the articulated symbolism are all mentioned characteristics, proving that the Bauhaus was a utopia of the craftsman artists. Turning towards the way these utopian thoughts are expressed, we analyse the stylistic features of the corpus of the manifesto. As Alex Danchev (2011, p. 21) highlights, “to manifesto is to perform”. The most influential performers of the modern movement, the Futurists created their artist manifesto in 1909. The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism written by the Italian-French poet, F.T. Marinetti, was a trend setter, violent and precise, in order to represent the art it stood up for. The Marinetti model of artists’ manifestos possess certain characteristics listed by Danchev (2011), and so does the language of utopia, described by Molnár (1993). We will highlight both these typical attributes in the corpus of Gropius’ manifesto1. As utopia has its critics of the era, manifestos always describe themselves against something, using many negations in the text: “the old schools of art were unable of produce this unity...”, “for art is not a profession”, “there is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman”. The manifesto’s text is vigorous and reductive, it is short, never long-winded and the conclusions are drawn fast. Manifesto obligato2 demands action directly from the reader, but using mostly plural forms, ‘us’, in order to invite him into the group. Just as utopias, it demands the change right here and right now, using imperatives: “Architects, painters and sculptors must learn anew and grasp the composite character…”, “The mere drawing and painting world … must become a world that builds again”, “we all must return to crafts”. It communicates revolution, which is always both a tool and goal for utopias and manifestos. The expressions are strong on remonstration: “Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen…!”, “together let us desire conceive and create the new structure of the future…!”. The indispensable ideal state towards the action taken appears in future tense, but without a certain date or time limit: “Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit…”, “the new structure of the future that will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity … and which will one day rise towards heaven”. Present tense verbs usually describe the undesirable state. Sometimes past tense refers to the recent past, the 1 The English translations of Gropius’s (1995).citations are identical with the manifesto’s original translation by Volfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Wingler, 1959). 2 Expression of Danchev (2011) to characterise how the manifesto obliges the readers to take action.

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 281 criticised state, but mostly it is for the once harmonious, ancient way of life: “To embellish buildings was once the noblest function of the fine arts, they were the indispensable components of great architecture”. A playfulness of the expressions can be observed that is maintained by a mixed language of rational, scientific and sentimental utterances, like “in rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art…”. This deliberate way of expression in the case of manifestos, when usually artists write texts, meets a kind of visual harmony labelled as “words in freedom” (Danchev, 2011). The typographical revolution did not leave the manifesto untouched; new rules of spelling and syntax arise in the texts, creating a close relationship with modernist concrete poetry. Even if the text is more traditional in appearance as in Gropius’ manifesto, illustrations, like the Cubist- Gothic ‘Cathedral’ by Lyonel Feininger (Fig. 1), trigger the imagination. The harmony of the paper is also strengthened by an inner symmetry of the textual space: the rhythmic changes of the oppositions of the ancient past, recent past or present and the future. The upbeat of the vision of an ideal past, when arts were all “components of the great architecture” creates a framework with the closing strophe of the vision of the ideal future, when arts will reunite for this very purpose. 4 THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF THE BAUHAUS As utopias have a strong relation with the representations of ideas, the Bauhaus ideology is also explicitly concerned with message, language and communication. Verbal language has a wide range of means to precisely convey a message through its form, but how about the other artistic disciplines? At the turn of the twentieth century the concept of a ‘language of vision’ arouse, with the ultimate goal to free forms from their conventional meaning. As Ellen Lupton (2004) puts it, this powerful metaphor highlights the interest of the artists of the era in theorising a new system of visual communication analogous to, but at the same time separate from, the verbal language. Following Lupton’s observations, we point out those characteristics of the visual grammar that intersects with the verbal

282 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY language, in order to highlight a consistency throughout the verbal, visual and 3- dimensional forms of art. Figure 1: Wassily Kandinsky, Diagram 20. Diagonal tension and counter-tension with a point which brings an external construction to inner pulsation (Kandinsky, 1947). The unique visual grammar of the Bauhaus was created by the school’s influential teachers and instructors. We turn towards the work of the two prominent figures of the basic form classes: the Russian abstract painter and writer Wassily Kandinsky and the Swiss artist Paul Klee. Kandinsky’s personality, art and theory are all imbued with spirituality. For him the world is a physical and spiritual complex, which can be represented graphically just like a translation (Kandinsky, 1947; Fig. 1). He defines the fundamental elements of painting as a dictionary leading to a grammar of composition. All drawn forms can be reduced to the basic element, the line, it’s departure, the point (cf. Beke, 2019), and where straight lines meet, the plane. The central notion of their transpositions is movement: the line is the “track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement — specifically through the destruction of intense, self- contained repose of the point” (Kandinsky, 1947, p. 57). The elements have their own

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 283 meanings related to man: the horizontal straight line expresses the horizontal platform on which the world exists for human beings, while the vertical is the mirror of the human verticality. The diagonal is a union of two basic relationships to the world and to ourselves, and it establishes various states of balance between the horizontal and the vertical (ibid, pp. 58–59). The point is liberated: it is freed from the bonds of the literary, it becomes a symbol and gains direct access to perception. The graphic language is universal. Various experiences can be represented through it: coldness and warmth through colours and also sounds through the directions of the lines (ibid, pp. 72–73). Paul Klee’s theory of the graphic language is connected to the same roots. He defines the same basic elements as Kandinsky and points out the temporal relation between them: the transformation of the point is a progression to line and the latter progress to plane (Klee, 1972). He also uses the metaphor between the verbal and visual forms, for instance the relations of the graphic elements are analogous to the passive and active voice in language. A point moving to become a line is ‘active’, a line moving to close a shape is ‘medial’ as it is a figure itself and a border of another form, while a line thickening to fill in the shape is ‘passive’ (ibid, p. 21). The meanings of the line is almost an infinite range, as Sybil Moholy-Nagy (1972, p. 32) summarises it: it can be regarded as point progression, planar definition, mathematical proportion, coordinator for the path of motion, optical guide and reason, psychological balance, energy projection, symbol of centrifugal and centripedal movement, symbol of will and infinity and of colour mutations and kinetic harmony. In the Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee (1972, pp. 23–24) also describes the composition principles of a picture, of which the most fundamental is balance. The ultimate harmony of an image is created, as he puts it, by “the restoration of a non-symmetrical balance”, which can be reached by correcting the overall balance of the metric (size), weight (saturation, dark-light) and character (colour hue) components. This higher symmetry composition can also be revealed through analysing his geometric painting, New Harmony, from 1936 (Fig. 2). As the art curator Nancy Spector highlights, this later piece demonstrates Klee’s interest in colour theory rendered through kinetic and musical allegories to colour in the Sketchbook (ibid, p. 31). As Andrew Kagan points out, the composition is based on the principle of bilateral inverted symmetry, as the opposite diagonal sides of the canvas are the upside-down reflections of each other. The distribution of the juxtaposed non-complementary colours and the use of twelve hues besides neutral grey and black underpainting evokes the non-thematic, monodic twelve- tone music of Arnold Schönberg, an Austrian composer and friend of the Bauhaus

284 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY (Kagan, 1983). In the painting, the Bauhaus utopia is manifested not only through the message of a new, both spiritually and compositionally ideal, state, but also through the connection of music and the fine arts. Figure 2: Paul Klee, New Harmony, 1936. The key to this new visual harmony is a special kind of symmetry, not the traditional axial, but an inverted one, which is important to analyse a bit more precisely. As Gábor Üveges (2007, pp. 23–31) puts it, the desacralisation process that reached the European culture also altered art through a touch of metaphysical sensitivity and apparent new generative rules of structures in abstract painting. The centre of the compositions is melting and disappearing and the former ‘hierophania’ that is reflected through symmetric, hierarchic, axial and centred, mostly static compositions gave way to polyarchic, asymmetric, dynamic, diagram-like structures. This change cannot be considered to be independent from the metamorphosis of the notion and role of symmetry in the natural sciences, such as in the theories of special and general relativity, wave theory and quantum theory. Symmetry operations were used in the mapping of crystals and molecules and group theory gave birth to abstract algebra in the beginning of the 20th

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 285 century. These all may have contributed to the fact that the neo-plasticist painters no longer organised the compositions around a centre or an axis, but to a ‘centroid’, the centre of gravity. This is the reason why the balancing and rebalancing of the ‘weights’ of the asymmetrical parts and elements of the canvas became the main principle in maintaining the visual harmony regarding the whole composition, just as Klee taught it in the Pedagogical Sketchbook. Hence, bilateral, higher order symmetries create a dynamic, tense balance, even if the picture seems to be asymmetrical for the first glance. Turning towards the successors of the work started by Kandinsky and Klee, we take a look at how the visual grammar changed and evolved in the work of the famous Hungarian Bauhausler, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, an enthusiastic follower who later joined the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago. For both of them, the same basics remained, but their theory became more elaborate and more precise, supported by conscious, scientific additions. Moholy-Nagy (1947) focused on the most precise form of representation and considered photography as a new kind of writing, the objective extension of the eye. This objectivity, the idea of a neutral, mechanical report of a phenomenon, fulfilled the aspiration to liberate art from the conventional meanings, while also distancing it from individual interpretations and connotations. This motivation lay deeply in the reflections of the era, when the utopian thought of unification not only reached art but also science. The semiotician Charles Morris was a member of the Unified Science movement, an initiative to describe the common philosophy, history and sociology of science (Neurath et al., 1938), and contributed to the creation of a simplified and purified language to use talking about art and science (Lupton, 2004). Through the influence of his lectures, semantics became a topic at the school and a scientific basis to theorise about artistic communication. For Moholy-Nagy and Kepes, the most inspiring notion of the form of the sign was the index, which, according to the classification of Ch. S. Peirce, has a real physical relation to its object, in opposition to symbols and icons (Short, 2007). For Moholy-Nagy (1969) this relation was the phenomenon precisely happening in photography: he was especially interested in diagrams, the indexical tracks of moving objects and the prints of light as a space-time articulation.3 3 This curiosity takes an extreme in the work of the also Bauhausler Oscar Schlemmer, who tracked dancers’ movements in a moulded 3-dimensional space (Birringer, 2013).

286 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY Besides the influence of semiotics, the psychology of perception of the period also had its impact on the theories of the artists. As Lupton points it out, there is no apparent evidence that either Kandinsky or Klee was directly influenced by Gestalt theory, but for György Kepes (1969, p. 17) it became a cited scientific base for the Language of Vision. The motivation behind this theory was to isolate visual language from the context of culturally acquired knowledge, and to learn the universal laws underlying visual perception. The claim was that the process of understanding the sensory data is not learned through conventions, but rather in the perceiver’s brain: orders and holistic patterns are created that are the same for everyone in respect of a number of inner rules. They tested the figure and background relations on simple line drawings and discovered principles of organisation such as of ‘similarity’ and ‘continuance’. Kepes solidified the rules with the additional principles of dynamism, balance, proportion, rhythm and depth representation (Lupton, 2004). This was an endeavour to get close to the universal, to seek a way to experience meaningless meaning. The object’s isolation and simultaneous reintegration from and to the context was joined by the also utopian motif of abstraction, taking further steps toward a new way of visual communication: contemporary advertising art. The strengthening concern of the changing context of perception and interpretation also led to the so-called product semantics of the Bauhaus. This was an attractive product design that formed the object to the closest possible to what the users perceived the product to be, hence highlighting a pragmatic sensitivity that goes hand in hand with the socialist ideology of design. As Mihai Nadin (1990) notes, the Bauhaus design was determined by the relation of art and the industry, but, in parallel, its semiotics became part of the social semiosis. It means that the participation of design in social and economic life was increasing, and the once social-utopian ideology turned into a more practical, pragmatist theory at the later period of the school. According to Üveges, parallelly, the formerly non-functional fine arts stepped out from the barriers of its discipline to change the physical reality and shifted towards industrial design and architecture. Product semantics worked too well in a way. The apparent puritanism, functionality and symbolism of the artistic objects were transformed for the users to be seen as products of a style and not the manifestations of a socialist value system or a new way of life. This

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 287 ‘ideological reduction’ pushed the arts back to the sphere of aesthetics, losing its social efficiency (Üveges, 2007, p. 122). Figure 3: Comparison of the Bauhaus to Pablo Picasso, L’Arlesienne, 1911-12 (Giedion, 1941, pp. 490–491). 5 THE BUILT MESSAGE OF THE BAUHAUS Architectural education started only later in the Bauhaus school, and the theories of artistic expression focused mainly on the graphic arts. The architectural language used by the instructors was more diverse; taking the buildings of the two directors, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, as an example, it is not obvious that they define the stylistic characteristics of the Bauhaus architecture. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, architecture and painting unintentionally shifted towards each other, and while the principles of painting became architectonic, architecture took over the visual arts’ formal language and partly its philosophy (Üveges, 2007). Siegfried Giedion (1941) calls this unifying tendency “subconscious methodical parallels” between the different disciplines. He even goes further when he pairs the Cubist painting, Picasso’s L’Arléseinne from 1911 with Gropius’ Bauhaus building from 1926 (Fig. 3). He highlights a new space-time experience, ‘simultaneity’, which is created through transparency, with overlapping planes and penetration of spaces. The painting shows the same object from two different viewpoints, a profile and the full face at the same time. For Giedion (1941, p. 497) “the Bauhaus was the only large building of its time that was so complete a crystallization of the new space conception”.The same effect is gained by the transparent glass curtain wall when the exterior and the interior of the building is presented simultaneously. The walls seem to be piled up one on another. Spaces that otherwise could not be seen together are

288 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY projected on each other at once. As there are no columns in the corners of the glass walls, just like formerly at Gropius’ Fagus Factory building, corners are dematerialized in a way which also strengthens this artistic experience. This principle also appears in the organisation of the interrelated and juxtaposed cubes from which the building is built up. These cannot be summed up from one viewpoint; the perceiver has to move around the complex and use a variety of reference points in order to comprehend this unprecedented ‘many-sidedness’. János Fajó (1999), in the 1970s and 80s, complied a set of grammatical rules that were drawn from the experiments of the avant-garde painting, and which are also applied in modern architecture. These principles were transposed from 2 to 3 dimensions through the so called ‘dimensional expansion’, the main idea of the Dimensionist movement. The movement’s basic underpinnings were the changing of the perception of space and time according to Einstein’s theories and the techniques of the age, and their use creating a new, evolved form of expression (Tamkó Sirató, 1936). In many fields of art, experiments were performed to expand the traditional formal language with a supplementary dimension, for instance creating concrete poems or kinetic sculptures. Danchev (2011, p. 291) highlights that this conscious search for the evolution of art through dimensional expansion had been in the air since the turn of the century, influencing both Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy (1932). Figure 4: Photo of the Director’s office, Bauhaus Building, Dessau, 1923. A basic grammatical operation, that is apparent after a dimensional step in the Bauhaus building, is the “division of the plane”. This operation is related to the Neoplatonic

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 289 endeavour to find the perfect proportions, and was dominantly present, for instance, in the works of Piet Mondrian, and very clearly expressed by the buildings of De Stijl in the Netherlands. The interior layout of the Director’s office is an experiment with squares, using partitions and screens that divide a cube measuring 5×5×5 metres, creating different sections and themes (Fig. 4). All views of the sections are partitioned in a harmonious scale, turning the 2-dimensional effect perceivable as the main characteristic of the whole space. The design of the room is a holistic composition that is strengthened by a series of formal objects, e.g., wall carpet, lamps, table and the famous F51 armchair, which are all works of the school’s teachers and students. The idea of holistic harmony dominated the first period of the school, when the basic form class was taught by Itten and harmonization lessons were also on the schedule, led by a unique German musician, Gertrud Grunow. Her Harmonisation Theory was also inspiring for Gropius (1923), who pointed out the twofold relevance of the idea, that are the unity of tone, colour and form, and through these the balance of the physical and psychological characteristics of the individual. Grunow searched for the unity of the senses, analysing “primal synaesthesia” with the developmental psychologist, Heinz Werner, and her colour-theory was created in analogy with the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schönberg (Burchert, 2018). Besides the “division of the plane” the grammatical operation of the “levitation of form” also appears in the Bauhaus building (Fig. 5). This “levitation” was typical of the Suprematism art movement and became a characteristic motif in the ‘international’ architectural language. It is apparent when looking at the Bauhaus building, as the cantilevered screens of glass curtain walls seem to be floating above the ground in the contrast to the shadows of their supporting lower beams. The illusion of victory over gravity and objects throwing off their weights was a central vision for both the modern art and architecture of the era. The “transparency” or “interference” basic operation is also evident at a glance, especially at the connections of the different building blocks and horizontal ‘glass bridges’. The compositions and reflections give the illusion that the blocks’ gestures, or movements in space, do not stop when touching each other, but rather they continue to enter one another. Various motives of “repetition” can be observed on the façades or the interior of the building, even when looking at its floor plan. The modular and the more complex serial system born through repetition — even on its extreme level — have been basic layers in

290 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY applied arts and architectural practice ever since. “Rotation” seems to be applied on the great blocks of the building. The global composition evokes an image of the three wings turned by 90 degrees around the meeting point of the long rectangular cuboids, the hypothetical centre of the composition where the aula is located. As Üveges (2007, p. 54) notes, the rotation as a basic operation of the architectural form-grammar is only used later in the 1970s theoretically parallel to the works of the visual artists like Moholy-Nagy or Ben Nicholson. But even before the works of John Hejduk, Peter Eisenmann or Zaha Hadid, the building of Gropius presents a fresh vista of dynamism and complex harmony. The building complex is again not centric or symmetric, but the whole composition is well-balanced thanks to the different ‘weights’ of the blocks and the length of ‘lever arms’, through which they are connected. The way the ‘arms’ join on two levels evokes a mental image of the inverted symmetry of the New Harmony stepping out from the plane of the canvas into the architectural space (cf. Katona, 2018). Figure 5: The Bauhaus building in Dessau today. (Photo: Dessau. GC y PS en la Bauhaus, 2015).

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 291 6 CONCLUSIONS To summarise our analysis, let us turn back to our primary hypothesis. We introduced a number of evidences, manifested in the content of its theory and the set of signs of its artistic representations, that the Bauhaus is a utopia. The utopian motives of universality, collectivism, unification, tabula rasa, ideal past state and religious faith all appeared in the theories and manifested in the symbolic languages of the different artistic representations. The ultimate aim of the artistic expression was to detraditionalize and free forms and the artistic sign systems from their conventional meanings. In the later stage of the school, this separating endeavour permeated even the connotational, individual interpretations. In the case of the verbal communication, the utopian features were maintained by a mixed language, new artistic forms of the texts that step towards diagrams, and by a symbolism of the verb tenses. The visual language of the school was precisely elaborated through a grammar based on 3 elements: the point, the line and the plane. The new compositional rules were no longer based upon centre and axis, but balance and harmony that can be created through special forms of symmetry. While for Kandinsky and Klee the basic elements could mean almost anything, e.g., relations to man, balance, harmony, movement, spiritual content, for Moholy-Nagy and Kepes the correspondences rather stood on a scientific foundation. New grammatical operations were used in the visual arts, just like the partition of the plane, the levitation of form, transparency, interference, repetition and rotation. These transformations were in harmony with the new space-time concept of the era, creating the effect of simultaneity. Similar to the way the utopian form of the text approached the image, the visual art got close to architecture and became architectonic in an unforeseen manner. The architectural forms in turn were inspired by visual representations and inherited many of the graphic arts’ compositional rules through the dimension step, even if often the spiritual contents were not ‘built in’ the spatial constructions. As we pointed out earlier, utopia has its own dead ends. As with most ideologies, the Bauhaus also lost its theoretical background at some point and became obsolete, and departing from life because of its abstraction. Robin Schuldenfrei (2018) notes that the idealistic, lofty, socialist rhetoric of the artist-craftsmen in the school was imposed as an elitist, aristocratic notion of taste upon the largely reluctant average citizens. She also points out that, ironically, the designs that looked cheaply produced in factories were in fact luxuries — expensive prototypes — that became a nightmare for retailers. Therefore, although Gropius continued to emphasize craft, in 1923 he realigned the goals of the

292 ZS. FRANCSICSNÉ SZÁNTAY Bauhaus with an emphasis on designing for mass production. Finally, the Bauhaus devolved from a world-changing idea to merely a style. Nevertheless, all these do not fade the original impulse of the theory, and of course, the masterpieces of the geniuses who were in relation with this unique school. For those who try to re-learn and understand the underlying message, it can revive any time in its full richness, and for all the others who use its objects, look at its images, or live in its buildings day by day, Bauhaus still remains positive and valuable. REFERENCES Beke, L. (2019) Black Hole, Einstein, Kandinsky, Dada, PoCo, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 30, 2, 115– 135.https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_2_115 Birringer, J. (2013). Bauhaus, Constructivism, Performance, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 35, 39– 52. https://doi.org/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00145 Burchert, L. (2018) Gertrud Grunow (1870–1944), retrieved from: https://edoc.hu- berlin.de/handle/18452/20284; https://doi.org/10.18452/19512. Călinescu, M. (1987) Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitch, Postmodernism, Durham: Duke University Press. Choay, F. (1980) The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism, 2nd ed., Cambridge: The MIT Press. Conrad, P. (1998) Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Danchev, A. Ed. (2011) 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London: Penguin Classics. De La Fuente, E. (2011) Twentieth Century Music and the Questions of Modernity, New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203845479 Elliot, T.S. (1921) London Letter, The Dial, 71, 10, 452–455. Fajó, J. (1999) Síkfestészet: A mód, A módszer, Budapest: Osiris. Friedland, R. and Boden, D., eds. (1994) NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1994) Foreword, In: Friedland, R. and Boden, D., eds. NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 11–13. Giedion, S. (1941) Space, Time and Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: The Harvard University Press. Gropius, W. (2011) What is Architecture?, In: Danchev, A., ed. 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London: Penguin Classics, 160–161. Gropius, W. (1995) Bauhaus Program, In: Washton Long, R.C., ed. German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 246 ff. Gropius, W. (1923) Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses, In: Nierendorf, K., ed. Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919 bis 1923, Weimar: Bauhausverlag, 7–18. Jervis, J. (1998) Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Kagan, A. (1983) Paul Klee: Art & Music, New York: Cornell University Press.

MESSAGE OF A WORLD-CHANGING UTOPIA 293 Kandinsky, W. (1947) Point and Line to Plane: Contribution to the Analysis to the Pictorial Elements, ed. Hilla, R., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Katona, V. (2018) Symmetries and proportions in architecture, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 29, 3, 325– 327. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2018_3_325 Kepes, G. (1969) Language of Vision, [reprint of the 1944 ed.], Chicago: Paul Theobald and Co. Kern, S. (1983) The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Klee, P. (1972) Pedagogical Sketchbook, [reprint of the 1953 ed.], New York: Praeger Publisher. Lupton, E. (2004) Writing lessons: Modern design theory, Typotheque, 29, 11; retrieved from: https://www.typotheque.com/articles/writing_lessons_modern_design_theory. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1947) New vision and Abstract of an Artist, [reprint of the 1928 ed.], New York: Wittenborn, Schulz Inc. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1969) Vision in Motion, 6th ed., Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1932) The New Vision: from Material to Architecture, New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam. Moholy-Nagy, S. (1972) Concluding notes, In: Pedagogical Sketchbook, 7th printing, [reprint, of the 1953 ed.], New York: Praeger Publisher. Molnár, T. (1993) Utópia – örök eretnekség, Budapest: Szent István Társulat. Nadin, M. (1990) Design and Semiotics, In: Koch, W.A., ed. Semiotics in the Individual Sciences, Vol. 2, Bochum: Brockmeyer, 418–436. Neurath, O., Bohr, N., Dewey, J., Russell, B., Carnap, R., Morris, C.W., eds. (1938) International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol 1-2, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schuldenfrei, R. (2018) Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933, Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.23943/9781400890484 Short, T.L. (2007) Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Somogyi, K., Balázs, M. and Dúll, A. (2019) Meanings of symmetry: The legibility of symmetry of historic school buildings, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 30, 1, 59–90. https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_1_059 Tamkó Sirató, K. (1936) Dimensionist Manifesto, In Danchev, A., ed. (2011) 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, London: Penguin Classics, 292–294. Üveges, G. (2007) Új párhuzamok az építészeti és képzőművészeti formaalkotásban: Architektonikus gondolkodás síkon és térben, forma és térszervezés két és három dimenzióban, [Ph.D. dissertation], Budapest: Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Csonka Pál Dokcroeal School; retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10890/1426 Wingler, H.M. (1959) The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Woolf, V. (1924) Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, In: The Hogarth Essays, No. 1, London: The Hogarth Press.



Symmetry: Culture and Science Vol. 30, No. 4, 295-312, 2019 https://doi.org/10.26830/symmetry_2019_4_295 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN HUNGARY FROM 1928 TO 1948 ACCORDING TO THE CONTEMPORARY SPECIALISED PRESS Rita Karácsony1*, Zorán Vukoszávlyev2 1 Department of History of Architecture and Monument Preservation, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 3. Műegyetem rkp., Budapest 1111, Hungary. E-mail: [email protected] 2 Department of History of Architecture and Monument Preservation, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 3. Műegyetem rkp., Budapest 1111, Hungary. E-mail: [email protected] *corresponding author Abstract: Influenced by the Modern Movement and the Bauhaus, architectural education in Hungary underwent a major transformation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. From time to time, the Hungarian specialized press, especially the magazine Tér és Forma paid much attention to the issue of architectural education. Because of the latter, this study examines the process of change in architectural education over the 20 years of existence of Tér és Forma (1928–48), and the specialized press’s reactions to the changes. It can be stated that while the more conservative Magyar Építőművészet did not find it important to influence the issue of architectural education, Tér és Forma, representing modern architecture, tried, through published articles, to determine the directions the editorial team thought right. Instead of extremes, they urged students and professors to find a middle ground. The desired balance was achieved at the Department of Architecture of

296 R. KARÁCSONY, Z. VUKOSZÁVLYEV the Technical University: first in the principle of “conservative progress” and then in “meaningful simplicity”. Keywords: architectural education, specialized press, Modernism, conservative progress, meaningful simplicity. 1 INTRODUCTION In the interwar period, the issues of culture, science and education became a priority in Hungary. After the Treaty of Trianon — due to the limitation of armament and territorial losses — essentially these intellectual resources were expected to help the country strengthen and then rise, among the newly created nation states in Central and Eastern Europe (Romsics, 2010, pp. 174–75). In addition to the development of primary and secondary education, the leaders of the Ministry of Culture also supported higher education, for example, the country's only technical college, the Királyi József Műegyetem (Royal Joseph Technical University), which was considered a fundamental pillar of culture (Zelovich, 1930, p. 94). Only this institution provided university degree in architecture at that time, which means that the designers of public construction projects had graduated at the Technical University. Although, some students gained their diploma abroad and later these were nostrified by the Hungarian university. In the 1920s, the conservative government preferred the historicizing or vernacular-rooted designs for the major developments in the capital (Ferkai, 1998). For this reason, the conservative approach of architectural education at the Technical University was not objected to; in fact, the institutionalization of a more modern approach was hindered.1 However, in parallel with the appearance of modern architecture in Hungary in the late 1920s, the issue of the current state of architectural education became increasingly important. Architect-editors of the Hungarian specialized press began to react to the visible signs of the transformation in 1 This was manifested, for example, in the fact that the financial and organizational situation of the general Department of Planning, established in 1923 and being at the forefront of innovation, was not resolved until 1928 (Héberger, 1979, pp. 599–601).

ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN HUNGARY FROM 1928 TO 1948 297 education happening under the influence of the Modern Movement, and at the same time they tried to set principles and directions for professors and students to follow. Three dates from the period 1928–48 are worth highlighting, when the topic of new generations in architecture came to the fore in the Hungarian specialized press. The first date is year 1930, in connection with the XII International Congress of Architects held in Budapest (Anon. 3, 1930). By this time, the influence of the Bauhaus and the Modern Movement had gained ground in Hungary. New architecture did not only influence the work of designers and professors, but it fundamentally changed architectural education as well (Fehér and Krähling, 2019). The second date is 1935, when some Hungarian magazines were even more determined to advocate for the new architecture and corresponding education. In connection with this, these journals gave then a review on the most progressive student designs created between 1930 and 1935. It is true, however, that the “menace” of the Modern Movement — and above all Formalism — were also brought to the focus of attention. The third important milestone is the period around 1948, when a completely new socio-political environment was developing in Hungary: the Communist takeover took place and the reorganization of the entire education system was also on the agenda. This study examines the topic of exactly which magazines, representing what kind of values responded to the changing architectural education at Budapest University of Technology. Did they play a role in promoting or hindering education reforms? What were the expectations of Hungary's only architectural training institution at the time? And what examples of good practice were set to follow in the articles published? 2 SPECIALIZED MAGAZINES AND ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION: FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCES During the period under review, there were two main forums for architectural writing in Hungary: the more conservative journal Magyar Építőművészet (Hungarian Architecture, existed from 1908 to 1944, re-launched in 1952), and the progressive Tér és Forma (1928–1948, from 1926 to 1927 published as an attachment to Vállalkozók Lapja (Journal of Contractors), which promoted modern architecture. The predecessor of Magyar Építőművészet was Magyar Pályázatok (Hungarian Competitions, 1903–07), which, as its name implies, was primarily concerned with the presentation of state-announced design competitions. From 1908, building contractor Miklós Führer took over the editorial tasks of the renewed journal, which, however, continued to publish works of

298 R. KARÁCSONY, Z. VUKOSZÁVLYEV historical or vernacular architectural origin, putting major state and capital constructions at the forefront. From 1928, Tér és Forma (Space and Form) was edited by architects Virgil Bierbauer (between 1928–42) and János Komor (until 1931), who fought for the acceptance of modern architecture (Virág and Ritoók, 2003, pp. 35–36), however, slavish copying of the new architectural forms was rejected from the beginning. The two publications featured significant differences in the matter of architectural education as well. While the former magazine regularly presented works designed by architect professors, Tér és Forma only published the teachers’ buildings that were modern enough. On one hand, this filtering or selection can be explained by the view of Tér és Forma, and on the other hand by the fact that editors expected the designers involved in architectural education to not only be open towards the new architecture in the field of education, but also in their private practice. Marcell Komor's article, written in 1929, set out these expectations most vividly, and at the same time he was the first to welcome the professors’ latest works that moved out of the influence of historical architecture (Komor, 1929). Another significant difference is that while Tér és Forma dealt with the current state of architectural education quite rarely but in a regular way, the more conservative journal did not devote a single article to the issue during the period under review. However, peer magazines (Építő Ipar – Építő Művészet, Magyar Mérnök és Építész Egylet Közlönye)2 filled this gap to some extent, especially in years of major changes (around 1930), although it was done mainly in defense of the historicizing, conservative view.3 From 1929 to 1948, student plans made at the University of Technology were constantly reported in the journals published by the Mérnöki Továbbképző Intézet (Institute of Postgraduate Engineering),4 although here only designs were presented without assessment or criticism. The series was edited by Iván Kotsis, a university professor who 2 The Építő Ipar – Építő Művészet finished publishing in 1932, and the Magyar Mérnök és Építész Egylet Közlönye in 1945. 3 For example, the Építő Ipar – Építő Művészet published the inaugural speech of architect professor Dezső Hültl in 1930, which, at first reading, can be interpreted as protecting Historicism over Modern architecture. However, the architect professor did not actually reject the new architecture in its entirety; just didn't consider it applicable to all types of buildings, e.g., a church. In this connection, he referred, for example, to the international design competition of the Palace of Nations in Geneva, when, despite the numerous Modern plans submitted, a plan based on elements of historical architecture was selected (Hültl, 1930). 4 Technikus (1919–22), later Technika (1923–46), and finally the trilingual Műegyetemi Közlemények (1947– 49).

ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN HUNGARY FROM 1928 TO 1948 299 did a great deal for the changes in Hungarian architectural education at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s. In fact, as Kotsis was appointed the head of the General Design Department in 1928, the reform of academic architectural education began, influenced by the modern aspirations coming from Western Europe, but initiated within the University of Technology. 3 CHANGES IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION: MAIN STAGES 3.1 The Student Exhibition in 1930 The general public also witnessed a transformation, not only from the aforementioned student plans published in the journals, but also on the occasion of student exhibitions; visitors could get acquainted with the design tasks assigned at the Technical University. The most significant exhibition took place in 1930 in the assembly hall of the Technical University, in connection with the XII International Congress of Architects. During the congress, visitors from abroad could have a mixed picture of both Hungarian architecture and architectural education. The reason for this was that at the international exhibition held at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle), the Hungarian displays included works created in the spirit of Historicism as well as photographs of buildings with very modern concepts (Anon. 3, 1930, pp. 58–93). At the same time, student plans showcased at the university represented a kind of transition between Historicism and modern design. Nevertheless, this university student exhibition can be considered a milestone in the history of modern architectural education in Hungary. In fact, changes already started in 1928, when student plans began to break away from historical architectural forms. However, it is true that, despite the clarity of the exterior, these designs were still based on symmetry, both in terms of floor plans and façades. Large, solemn compositions can also be found in the material of the 1930 exhibition, but the number of less articulated wall surfaces increased (Anon. 4, 1930). Tér és Forma responded briefly to the exhibition, encouraging professors and students: “The university students’ exhibition introduced immediately after the main exhibition could be matched by the impression of the latter, giving a brilliant testimony to the truly modern spirit that dominates technology. The soundness

300 R. KARÁCSONY, Z. VUKOSZÁVLYEV of the works already suggests strong competitors for the near future!” (Bierbauer, 1930). This time the report was not illustrated with pictures, as Technika published all the plans (Anon. 4, 1930; Figs. 1–2). Figures 1–2: Student designs, J. Wanner, G. Preisich (Anon. 4, 1930, appendix). The exhibition was organized by Professor Kotsis, who, according to his own admission, tried to select the material in a way to give the best possible picture of Hungarian architectural education to the international public, but he was aware that university education was still far from progressive Modernism (Kotsis, 2010, p. 200). However,

ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN HUNGARY FROM 1928 TO 1948 301 reaching it was not the goal. In 1930, Kotsis called the process taking place in the Department of Architecture at the University of Technology a “conservative progress”, which approach he considered to be appropriate. This point of view did not reject the progressive modern architecture in every aspects, but tried to keep the students away from fashionable solutions and called increased attention to the role of the past and to local materials as well as structures (Kotsis, 1930). In fact, with articles published in 1928–29, the editorial staff of Tér és Forma already “prepared” this trend to follow, although they seemingly did not take a firm stand. In 1928, the journal introduced three foreign architectural institutes: the school in Stuttgart, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and, of course, the most impressive Bauhaus could not be left out either (Robertson, 1928; Padányi, 1928; Kállai, 1928). Against such extremes like the Bauhaus, however, the editors suggested a search for a safe middle-of-the-road position. This was reflected, for example, in their advocacy of the importance of tradition and of studying the architecture of bygone times, which could have been inspiring for practitioners of modern architecture too. The opinion of the editors was also reflected in the way they responded to the three courses or workshops newly launched in Budapest in 1928 (Anon. 2, 1928). This year Farkas Molnár and Pál Ligeti organized an architectural course inspired by the Bauhaus. It was held in the private school called “Műhely” (the workshop) founded by Sándor Bortnyik painter and graphic artist (Bakos, 2018). As a former Bauhaus student (1921– 24), Molnár had a personal insight into the educational methods of the German institution (Ferkai, 2011, pp. 66). After coming home from the Bauhaus, he had to continue his unfinished university studies to get a degree. His university consultants did not really let the principles of the new architecture come into play in Molnár’s student plans (Major, 1978, p. 67); however, he was able to present a Bauhaus plan at the exhibition organized by the students in 1927 at the Technical University, which was not ignored by the editors of Tér és Forma. It was highlighted among other historicizing designs as an example of the Modern German School (Anon. 1, 1927). In 1928, Tér és Forma reported on the launch of two other courses: a conservative (historicizing) architecture course at the College of Fine Arts and a training in interior design at the College of Applied Arts, rooted in vernacular architecture, called the “Hungarian Home”. Seeing the new courses, the editorial staff evaluated the situation as “our art is moving between extremes” (Anon. 2, 1928). So, even initiatives coming from outside the Technical University intended to

302 R. KARÁCSONY, Z. VUKOSZÁVLYEV transform architectural education, only these were not fully compatible with the editors' ideas. The expected synthesis, or can also be called symmetry, was mainly accomplished in the architectural training of the Technical University around 1930, as Professor Iván Kotsis also pointed out in his article Építésznevelés a Műegyetemen (Architectural Education at the Technical University) published in 1930 (Kotsis, 1930). Thanks to the educational reform, design was placed at the center of the curriculum, the number of practical and design theory lessons were increased, and three new subjects were introduced in the service of design theory education: Spatial Art, Urban Design, and the Design of Industrial and Agricultural Buildings. Students were not restricted in their freedom to choose the consultants and the architectural and design trend they found appropriate to follow. At the same time, professors did not give up the pronounced teaching of architectural history, the design of forms and drawing, for these subjects were all considered the best developers of the sense of proportion, such foundation courses being part of the education in general architectural literacy. For similar reasons, also monument surveys were attributed an important role, as they help experience the proportions in practice and learn about the use of materials and structures in historical architecture. From time to time, the significance of surveys was emphasized by Tér és Forma, too. The journal appreciated the surveys of the Higher School of Civil Engineering in Budapest (Bierbauer, 1929) as much as this kind of work performed by the Department of Medieval Construction of the Technical University (Bierbauer, 1941). 3.2 The mid-1930s Five years after the large-scale student exhibition held in 1930, Tér és Forma began to re-engage in architectural education at the Technical University. The report shows that the initial encouragement came to fruition: fresh, bold plans were made between 1930 and 1935 (Figs. 3–6, cf. Figs. 7–8). Symmetrical compositions largely disappeared, and this time the inner drive led the students to use new solutions. Modern architecture was no longer just about appearance or omitting decoration. In this context, however, some rather unrealistic concepts were also created. Out of the many student works, the journal highlighted these progressive plans as they fitted into the ars poetica announced in 1935. That is, the editor no longer wanted to make compromises: in the future, he wanted to publish only works and plans that he could fully identify with. These plans should have

ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN HUNGARY FROM 1928 TO 1948 303 represented the new architecture but be free from the mistake of Formalism (Bierbauer, 1935a). Although it is not clear from the Tér és Forma article written on student plans, but the design of rural and countryside buildings and their integration into the environment also played an important role in design education even then, as evidenced by the works presented in Technika. The magazine Perspektíva was launched also in 1935, edited by Károly Weichinger, who taught architectural design at the College of Applied Arts and worked as a freelance lecturer at Professor Kotsis’General Design Department at the Technical University. The short-lived journal published only one issue in 1936 and then ceased to exist, but the editorial preface set interesting goals to encourage further research. Figures 3–6: Student designs, P. Démann, I. Gyöngyösi (Bierbauer, 1935b, p. 95, 97).

304 R. KARÁCSONY, Z. VUKOSZÁVLYEV Figures 7–8: Student designs, G. Bene, P. Szoyka (Kotsis, 1937). For example, the magazine should fight against Formalism and ‘fake modernity’. The editors admitted that the Modern Movement’s greatest results are the new floor plan and novel structure, which of course had an impact on the façade, but this should not mean a necessary start from the exterior during design. So, a revision of the new architecture was