Building a Better World: Function, Malfunction and Unruly Bodies

Beautiful. Sustainable. Together.

Navigating to NEB-Star’s website,1New European Bauhaus Stavanger, https://nebstar.eu/ my screen is filled with an aerial photograph of Stavanger overlayed with the words “BEAUTIFUL. SUSTAINABLE. TOGETHER.” written in a white, softly rounded sans-serif font. The image centres on Skansekaien, one of the many ports of Stavanger, and depicts a harbour’s edge defined by industrial activity. The city spills outwards; mid-rise structures occasionally break up the dominating architecture of low-rise, white-painted buildings with sloping red-brown tile gabled roofs. Water fills the foreground of the photo wrapping around the city and appearing again in the background together with mountains that stretch off into the distance. Two boats in motion disturb the otherwise still harbour that reflects a slightly overcast sky.

On September 16, 2020 in a speech to the European Parliament, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen emphasised the need for protection, stability and opportunity as Europe moved from the fragility of COVID towards “a new vitality”.2https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/ov/SPEECH_20_1655 To achieve this, von der Leyen announced an ambitious plan to fund scientific and artistic projects aimed at abating climate change and meeting Europe’s goal to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The commission named this plan the New European Bauhaus – a cultural movement that aims to bring the European Green Deal to life. The New European Bauhaus will be “a collaborative design and creative space, where architects, artists, students, scientists, engineers and designers work together to make this vision a reality”3https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/AC_20_1916 within and beyond Europe’s borders. A vision based on sustainability, accessibility and aesthetics.

NEB-Star is an offshoot of this larger project, the city of Stavanger having been selected as one of six pilot cities, or “lighthouse demonstrators”, for the New European Bauhaus between 2022-2025. Funded by the EU, the project involves 16 partners, amongst them The City of Stavanger, NTNU, Nordic Edge, Smedvig, and DOGA. Two sites within Stavanger have been allocated as testing grounds: Pedersgata in Stavanger city centre and Site 4016, a business area south of the city centre in Åsen.4https://nebstar.eu/about-the-project/

From my first encounter with NEB-Star’s marketing and online identity I am left with more questions than answers. It is difficult to grasp what the project is in reality – its actual measurable outcomes – beyond the imaginary it creates and the promotional language it uses, something beautiful, sustainable and for everybody. This language is distinctly utopian, as we (presumably exclusively the European citizen) are called on to “imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls”.5https://new-european-bauhaus.europa.eu/index_en Proclaimed as a new cultural movement, the New European Bauhaus has aligned itself with the Bauhaus and modernism, adopting its identity, ethos and utopian spirit. On their website, NEB-Star outlines the importance of the Bauhaus for industrial design and the development of functionalism in architecture. I’m surprised by this alignment as there has been considerable retrospective critiques of modernism’s understanding of “the user” as passive, predictable, and universal.6See: Hill, J. (2003) Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users, Routledge, New York Revisiting the history of the Bauhaus and my own experience with its after-effects, I question what values the New European Bauhaus has adopted and architecture’s overall aversion to malfunction. This chosen inheritance sits uncomfortably with me and it is this feeling I attempt to interrogate below.

Building a Better World

The Bauhaus was a German school of architecture, design and crafts that operated between 1919 and 1933. Founded in the wake of WWI by architect Walter Gropius, the school “promised a radical, utopian transformation of the very fabric of life: the entire world would be redesigned for the better”.7https://www.apollo-magazine.com/luxury-modernism-bauhaus-book-review/ Remembered today for its equation of modernity with industrialisation and quest to mass produce functional, inexpensive and “purified” objects to elevate the standard of living for the masses, the utopian vision of the Bauhaus has a more complex and contradictory history.8https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/the-history-of-the-bauhaus-reconsidered_o

The school was originally inspired by the mediaeval guild system and integration of arts within construction, as expressed in Gothic churches. Turn-of-the-century movements emphasising handmade objects and the absence of ornamentation such as the Vienna Werkstätte and British Arts & Crafts movement were also influential.9ibid. Although remaining united under the utopian goal to revolutionise the way people live, “the ideology of the school evolved through often messy, contested transitions involving the rise, fall, and absorption of different design movements and disciplines: Expressionism, mysticism, de Stijl, folklore, and Constructivism.”10ibid.

A critical turning point for the school occurred in 1922 and 1923 as it shifted away from these initial ideas of utopian, spiritual and artistic freedom towards utilitarian industrial functionalism. Ideals of modernism and constructivism prompted Gropius to change the Bauhaus’s motto in 1923 to “Art and technology, a new unity.”11https://madparis.fr/l-esprit-du-bauhaus The school was also under pressure from the increasingly right-wing Thuringian state government that funded the Bauhaus to contribute to these costs by collaborating with big business. Gropius focused on creating student workshops that could become “laboratories for industry” and students and colleagues felt compromised by Gropius’ new commodity fetishism. In Luxury and Modernism, Robin Schuldenfrei focuses on this period to challenge the idealistic socialist rhetoric of the Bauhaus, arguing that in reality it imposed an unwelcome elitist aristocratic notion of taste on the masses.12https://www.apollo-magazine.com/luxury-modernism-bauhaus-book-review/

After relocating to Dessau in 1925, Hannes Meyer took over as director between 1928 and 1930. Under Meyer, the Bauhaus educated “the modern architect as a scientist who would operate through standardised processes, while dismissing ‘form-finding’ as ‘purely artistic’.”13Meister, A.M. (2018) From Form to Norm: Systems and Values in German Design circa 1922, 1936, 1953, Princeton University, Princeton. Standardisation of norms in design was a national project in Germany at this time, as both bureaucratic authorities and creative producers sought to bring together aesthetics and morals. “Beyond their task of regulating object-producing machines, norms manifested and communicated desired social values.”14ibid. Norms streamlined industrial progress which was seen as vital for the betterment of society.

The school was forced to move again in 1932 to Berlin by the local National Socialist government. The Bauhaus’ last director Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe decided to close the school in 1933 after a raid by the Gestapo and amidst the rise of Nazi Germany. Many survivors of the Bauhaus left Germany for the United States during this period, taking with them a functionalist modernist design ethos. One outcome of this, Schuldenfrei states, was the co-option of modernist architecture and design by big-business, transforming it into the corporate language of power. “The glass tower that Mies proposed in 1920s Germany – whose transparency heralded a new, inclusive, socialist world – was finally realised on the streets of Manhattan in the smoked windows of the Seagram building, which defined a new vernacular of American power, and is echoed in the gold-accented façade of Trump Tower.” 15ibid.

Function

I encountered the echoes of the Bauhaus both in my education as an interior architect and the two years I spent working in an architecture office in Sydney. The office was established in 1949 by an Austrian architect who, after studying under Gropius at Harvard University, Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College, and working with Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Oscar Niemeyer, arrived in Australia a fervent disciple of modernism. He introduced Bauhaus principles to the Australian architectural landscape, altering the skyline of Sydney with some of its first highrise buildings.

70 years later and 13 years after his death, I sat amongst this legacy, swinging side to side in a black leather and aluminium Eames office chair surrounded by off-form concrete and floor to ceiling glass windows. My boss, his successor, was kind and knowledgeable and taught me the principles integral to Modern architecture. I learnt that the smallest detail was as important as the overarching structure, and each should remain true to the design concept as a whole (a gesamtkunstwerk). When specifying finishes, the rule was that if the vertical surfaces, such as the walls, were light (travertine), then the horizontal surfaces, such as the floor, should be dark (black granite). Form always follows function, each element reduced to its purest form, and it is in this purity that beauty is found.

I memorised the standard height of an office desk, 72cm, the depth of a kitchen counter, 60cm, and the internal width of a door, 90cm. Drawing window mullions to resemble the composition of a Mondrian painting, I recognised how art could be translated aesthetically into a building, but didn’t see it in design methods. There were things that made me feel out of place in this environment; a queer young feminist surrounded by the ghosts of a design movement that barred most women from workshops16In 1971 Marcel Breuer stated “How much is tradition and how much is biology, I don’t know, but so far we just don’t have great women architects” (Reif, R. (1971) Fighting the system in the Male-Dominated Field of Architecture, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/11/archives/fighting-the-system-in-the-maledominated-field-of-architecture.html) and proclaimed themselves the authority on the right way of doing things. In retrospect, it was the idea of functionalism in particular that felt exclusive. Functionalism refers to the idea that the form of a building should follow practical considerations such as use, material and structure. However behind practical considerations of use is an ideal user, for whom architecture is functioning for. Lost in the infinite landscape of 3D models, downloading furniture now considered design classics that emerged from the Bauhaus, I craved alternative role models, other ways of seeing or doing things.

Functionalism refers to the idea that the form of a building should follow practical considerations such as use, material and structure. However behind practical considerations of use is an ideal user, for whom architecture is functioning for.

Unruly bodies

This sense of “misfitting” or being invisible within the dominant discourses and practices of architecture is explored by the work of architect and activist Jos Boys. 17Jos Boys is co-founder and co-director, with disabled artist Zoe Partington, of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project which brings disabled artists and architects into built environment education and practice to critically and creatively re-think disability, design and built space.

These notions are explored in her text Invisibility work? How starting from dis/ability challenges normative social, spatial and material practices. Invisibility work, Jos writes, “concerns both the amount of unnoticed effort that goes into making disability as a concept and disabled people as a constituency invisible; and the very invisibility of abled-ness that allows ‘normal’ bodies to be seen as nothing much, as not worth talking about.” 182018 p.271

One way of challenging invisibility work, Jos puts forward, is in recognising the creative potential of valuing the rich bio and neuro-diversity of ‘unruly’ bodies. The term “unruly bodies” refers to bodies that are unconsidered, unnoticed, or noticed only as a ‘problem’ by building producers or occupiers. This is not only true for disabled bodies but also for numerous others; bodies that are trans, BIPOC, very young and/or elderly (to name a few). Following Jos Boys’ thinking around the potential of unruly bodies – misbehaving – I feel myself drawn closer to the idea of malfunction as opposed to function.

Malfunction

I see malfunction not as a limitation but as a starting point. A breaking down that reveals how hard we work to make some realities seamless while others are met with obstacles at every turn. There are numerous discussions happening in architecture today centred on the need to move beyond comfort19See: After Comfort: A User’s Guide a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Liverpool, and Transsolar.t https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/after-comfort/ or the Failed Architecture podcast series On Discomfort

https://failedarchitecture.com/podcast/on-discomfort-episode-1-w-juana-maria-victoria-and-maria/ and to be aware of the mechanisms of power keeping us there.

In the book Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives (2023), for example, author René Boer argues that in the search for perfection, efficiency and control, the ‘smooth city’ ends up undermining the democratic nature and emancipatory potential of cities. Boer characterises the ‘smooth city’ as sterile, clean, and layered with new technologies which makes urban life seem frictionless. This smoothness leaves little space for experimentation, non-normativity or transgression. He uses the example of Amsterdam, contrasting its rough streets of the past with its present day homogenous aesthetics, minimalist shopping windows and shiny Uber taxis.20Boer, R. (2023) Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives, Valiz, Amsterdam. This is not to say that safety and cleanliness is not worth striving for, but a provocation to remind us what is at stake in a frictionless future devoid of difference.

This is not to say that safety and cleanliness is not worth striving for, but a provocation to remind us what is at stake in a frictionless future devoid of difference.

In order to ensure comfortable and climate-controlled surroundings, fossil fuel use has been locked into buildings and lifestyles, seen in the air conditioned home or shopping centre. Therefore, to achieve a significant reduction in net-carbon emissions, building more efficiently is not enough. Existing structures need to be rapidly and radically de-carbonised.21https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/after-comfort/568230/editorial/ This process, as well as working against “green inequity”, must involve some level of discomfort, or at least a reframing of what comfort is. While it is critical that architecture and the building industry at large responds to the climate crisis we are living in, it is also important to be reflective of the principles and processes we choose to inherit.

While it is critical that architecture and the building industry at large responds to the climate crisis we are living in, it is also important to be reflective of the principles and processes we choose to inherit.

Published in response to the launch of the New European Bauhaus, Hicham Khalidi and Rolando Vázquez unpack the power of symbols and names in their article "A New Bauhaus? The Debate for a More Inclusive Europe."22https://www.janvaneyck.nl/news/het-nieuwe-bauhaus Khalidi and Vázquez point out the contradictions and dangers inherent in naming a new European cultural Green Deal after the Bauhaus, a Eurocentric movement linked to industrial capitalism that engendered social and ecological injustice. This, they argue, goes against the very core of what climate thinking should be about. “Our critique of invoking the Bauhaus School for a supposedly broad European initiative inscribes itself in these struggles to move beyond a limited, monocultural understanding of Europe toward one that acknowledges and cherishes the pluralities that enrich its societies.”23ibid.

Stavanger, as a pilot city for the New European Bauhaus, has an opportunity to challenge the status quo of how things have been done and the types of cities we envision, demanding that design and architecture critically and creatively engage with its own normativity. As NEB-Star moves forward with its goals to create a beautiful, sustainable future together I encourage politicians, city planners, architects, designers, and artists to question who these imagined utopias are really for.

Maike Statz (AUS) is a Bergen-based interior architect and artist interested in the relationship between bodies and space. Her practice spans curation, publishing, writing, and design. Through her work she is committed to challenging the inequalities that exist in space and spatial practices. Current areas of interest include situated writing methods, queer and feminist spatial practices, the relationship between emotion, identity and space, and rethinking architecture through speculative fiction.

In 2022 Statz co-founded the project space and platform NOGOODS and the magazine bias: bodies in architecture and structures with Danja Burchard, now run with Francesca Scapinello. Recent design and curatorial projects include Hosting Space (June 2023) at Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen and Dissident Publics (May-June 2023) with NOGOODS and Exutoire at ROM for kunst og arkitektur in Oslo. Maike enjoys swimming, feminist science fiction and making furniture.

*The above text was commissioned in collaboration with Stavanger municipality's project NEBSTAR — New European Bauhaus Stavanger. CAS and NEBSTAR have entered into a collaboration on a collection of texts that are part of CAS' ongoing text series "Built Environments". The series presents different approaches to urban development and different opinions on the design of urban landscapes. CAS has editorial freedom and editorial responsibility in this collaboration.