The Epic of the Bauhaus: When Architecture Decided to Begin the World Again

Europe after the First World War is an empire of ashes when Walter Gropius stands up, carrying no hammer to destroy the past, and the Bauhaus begins. The school's laws are set out in turn: no wall between art and craft, the building as the great poem, a hand that also thinks because knowledge lives inside the hammer, nothing without necessity, and beauty that is no privilege of the wealthy. A school that refuses to be a classroom follows, then the persecution that came when power feared it, and the glass and steel its students carried across the world. Long after its founders are gone, the book asks whether the architect is merely a maker of forms.