Open any décor or design magazine and you'll find approving descriptions using these words: sleek, clean-lined, uncluttered, open-plan ... They're the essence of what it means to be modern, even now, as the Bauhaus celebrates its centenary.
The Bauhaus - directly translated, Building House - was an idiosyncratic German arts and design school launched 100 years ago in Weimar, in the wake of WWI. It didn't last long. Fourteen years and three moves later it was gone, closed under pressure from the Nazis. But in that time, it spawned the single most influential design movement of the 20th century, and still retains an iron grip on ideas of what good design is.
Take a look at anything from an iPhone to a new Land Rover, and you'll find contemporary expressions of Bauhaus ideals persisting at the cutting edge of design. Every glass-and-aluminium-fronted skyscraper or rectangular "glass-box" house, every built-in kitchen, every steel-tubed cantilever chair and graphically minimalist advertising logo owes a debt to the Bauhaus. Even the sayings "Less is more" and "form follows function" are Bauhaus derivatives.
While Barcelona chairs and corporate superblocks are now so omnipresent as to seem unimaginative, the Bauhaus design was once radical and ground-breaking. It was a response to the cultural and political dead end that WWI seemed to represent 100 years ago. In Europe, it felt as if there needed to be a clean break with the past, which had brought nothing but the atrocities of war.
This dramatic loss of faith in the old ways fed the Bauhaus desire to create a new world and new ways of living. A design language emerged that was minimalist, functional, honest and true to materials. It might have had an unembellished beauty, but the idea was that nothing was inessential: these designs aspired to be as pure, efficient and rational as a machine. Like abstract art, which abandoned representational images for pure colour and form, modernist design left behind the decorative and figurative.
Another of its aims was to reconcile craft and industrial-scale mass production. At one point its slogan became "Art into Industry". When it was first launched, the Bauhaus was envisioned as "a new guild of craftsmen". The curriculum was craft-based with an emphasis on artisanal skills - pottery, carpentry, metalwork, weaving, textile design, plus art and crackpot philosophy.
Famous names like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky were all involved. When it closed, before WWII, members fled around the globe. Paradoxically, its closure in many ways ensured its legacy. Gropius, Van der Rohe, Breuer and others ended up in the US. But the teachers and students of the Bauhaus were scattered far and wide and there are Bauhaus buildings everywhere from Johannesburg to Tel Aviv.
The US probably gave the movement its most powerful international platform but stripped the radical utopian socialist ideals out of its aesthetics, leaving the beauty and purity of form, but little of the philosophy. In the US Bauhaus became more of an aesthetic movement than the aesthetic expression of a social and political movement.
The SA architectural landscape didn't escape the Bauhaus influence either. One of the last of its students was architect Pius Pahl, who had a practice in Stellenbosch. He designed around 90 buildings, including a number of houses still standing in the Western Cape. According to the Stellenbosch Heritage Survey and Management Plan, the town has "the biggest collection of private homes designed in the Bauhaus tradition".
Pahl also designed apartment blocks and offices in Cape Town, including La Corniche and Valhalla in Clifton.
SA wasn't the only African country to be touched by the Bauhaus legacy. Centenary celebrations included commissioning a documentary, part of the travelling "Bauhaus Imaginista" exhibition, about what's now known as the Obafemi Awolowo University (originally the University of Ife).
Israeli architect Arieh Sharon was commissioned in 1960 to design the campus after Nigeria's independence from British colonial rule. Sharon studied at the Bauhaus in the early '30s in Dessau, became head of Israel's National Planning Authority, and is partly responsible for Tel Aviv's Bauhaus legacy.
The Nigerians weren't keen on British or European architects to express their new independent identity, and it's interesting to see how Sharon didn't impose the typical international style on the campus, but designed for climate and context, using inverted pyramid shapes to create shelter from sun and rain, open courtyards and natural airflow, and decorative influences from Yoruba culture.
Another was Steffen Ahrends, who settled in SA in the late '30s and designed hundreds of buildings, including the social sciences building at Wits and about 450 houses.
The cultish figure of Wilhelm Pabst also had Bauhaus connections. Although he didn't study at the school, he worked for Mies van der Rohe on projects including the Barcelona Pavilion. There are still Pabst buildings in Joburg: Patadir Mansions on President Street, the Chinese United Club Mansions on Commissioner Street and the Colin Gordon Nursing Home in Hillbrow.
The massive success of the Bauhaus also represents a failure of sorts. Its motto "the needs of the people instead of the need for luxury" hardly seems embodied in the prices paid for an original Barcelona chair, which now has the status of a rare sculpture rather than an accessible example of good design for the masses. The elegance and complexity of the best Bauhaus buildings became a stylistic tick, ubiquitously adopted and often badly executed: bland corporate monstrosities rather than brave new world.
However, aspects of the original Bauhaus approach seem to have renewed relevance today with the tensions and necessities of a globalised world. As we worry about computers replacing people and the implications of AI, the Bauhaus was preoccupied with the role of the human touch in an industrialised world. The emphasis on craft was a way of perpetuating the human values that seemed inherent in pre-industrial craft.
Even the current need to find an optimistic, forward-looking vision in a world riven by reactionary, divisive politics is not a world away from the concerns that the Bauhaus was addressing a century ago.
In SA, many felt Ahrends had abandoned his Bauhaus roots when he started building houses that looked more like Arts and Crafts cottages than the glass boxes of the International Style. The houses he made popular in Joburg were built using gum poles, had thatched or tiled pitched roofs, bagged brick walls and wooden or quarry-tiles floors. Nothing like the Bauhaus, right?
But his use of materials is honest and pragmatic: they were easily available and affordable in a time of post-war scarcity. He combined international principles with natural local materials and vernacular influences. In the contemporary terms in vogue at the moment, he was thinking global and acting local.
The work of his disciples, such as Donald Turgel, Michael Sutton and David Walker, adopted many of these elements to forge a kind of materially rich African modern architecture. In some of the African offshoots of the Bauhaus, there might be some lessons as the continent's cities develop and modernise.
• In Germany, a programme of Bauhaus centenary celebrations run throughout the year. Visit bauhaus100.com
