The Bauhaus and economic design
In which we discuss how an introductory economics class can capture the free-flowing spirit of creativity and irreverence of the Bauhaus.
This newsletter started with the idea of imagining how the Bauhaus, one of the cradles of modern design and architecture, would teach an economics course.
The suggestion was a bit of an in-joke for anyone who spent enough time in both worlds to recognize the wide gap in mindsets between quant-minded, sober economics education and our somewhat nostalgic conception of the Bauhaus as a refuge for free-flowing creativity and irreverence.
As it turned out after a bit of research, the real Bauhaus didn't offer an economics course, but it offered one in business administration.
“(1) Practical Instruction in the handling of Stone, Wood, Metal, Clay, Glass, Pigments, Textile-Looms; supplemented by lessons in the use of Materials and Tools, and a grounding in Book-Keeping, Costing and the Drawing-Up of Tenders.” — Walter Gropius, The new architecture and the Bauhaus, 1937.
If this goes against its reputation, on second thought it makes a lot of sense, especially against the backdrop of modern design curricula where such an offering is exceedingly rare.
Designers and architects are more likely than the typical college graduate to end up in a small agency, a design studio, or set up their own venture, so they're more exposed to the vagaries of running a business and the fluctuations in demand for design work, as Gropius fully understood.
Even if it doesn't fit the stereotype, by introducing its students to the secrets of bookkeeping and financial planning, the Bauhaus was ahead of its time in more than one dimension.
The Bauhaus as a state college was not only dependent on political patronage, increasingly difficult to obtain under increasingly difficult circumstances, but also on private funding and the willingness of private employers to hire its graduates or adopt its designs.
As a college that emerged from the combination of the schools of fine arts and the applied arts, this also required Gropius and his successors to put increasing emphasis on designing useful products.
Also, as a staunchly modernist school, Bauhaus was well attuned to the newest ideas in scientific management. Gropius was an early acolyte of Taylorism and Fordism, and his ideal customers for Bauhaus designs were “large-scale business concerns with reliable good taste for export success”.
(Ironically, the only Bauhaus output that had any success in the marketplace were not the famous chairs or lamps, but lowly wallpapers and textiles. The weaving workshop, the only one accessible to female students, was also the only one that turned a profit.)
So there is a notable tension between our modern conception of the Bauhaus as the originator of high-priced collectors items and architectural landmarks and its actual role as a forbearer of mass-produced consumer goods. Ikea shelves might be closer to the true legacy of the Bauhaus than Wassily chairs.
But it's a tension worth investigating, because undoubtedly the Bauhaus offered a radically new way of teaching design.
When Walter Gropius presented his plan for the Dammerstock social housing estate in Karlsruhe, popular opinion likened it to a railyard. Le Corbusier's unités d'habitation acquired the sobriquet “machines for living”. Peter Behrens's AEG turbine factory in Berlin-Moabit is considered the original modernist building in Germany, and Walter Gropius, previously an employee at Behrens's architecture firm along with Le Corbusier and other modernist stalwarts, built the Fagus factory in Alfeld (along with Adolph Meyer, another Behrens alumnus) before designing the very similar Bauhaus building in Dessau.
The parallels are already there, so it makes perfect sense to investigate which parts of the Bauhaus curriculum can be transitioned to a curriculum for economic design.
Bauhaus instruction and the Vorkurs
An obvious starting point is the Vorkurs, the preliminary course which all students had to pass before they were allowed to branch off into their respective specializations and workshops.
The Vorkurs (sometimes translated as basic course, but I’ll stick with preliminary course) was a half- or full-year integrated course initially taught by Johannes Itten, and later, with some overlap, by Johannes Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Despite his relatively short tenure from 1919 to 1923, prior to the move to Dessau, it’s Itten’s Vorkurs that still shapes the public imagination, with his meditation, stretching, and breathing exercises to start the classes, and his affiliation with the Mazdaznan philosophy.
As entertaining as it might be to contemplate the scene of Itten teaching an economics class at a venerable university, this newsletter has a more prosaic goal, which is to look at the substance of the instruction (which should be replicable) rather than the foibles of the instructors (which might be idiosyncratic to those famed but usually short-lived design schools like the Bauhaus, the HfG Ulm, or the Black Mountain College).
Beyond the practical instruction, Gropius also set the guidelines for the formal part of the curriculum.
“(2) Formal instruction under the following heads:
(a) Aspect
The Study of Nature
The Study of Materials(b) Representation
The Study of Plane Geometry
The Study of Construction
Draughtmanship
Model-Making(c) Design
The Study of Volumes
The Study of Colors
The Study of Compositionsupplemented by lectures on all branches of art (both ancient and modern) and science (including elementary biology and sociology).” — Walter Gropius, The new architecture and the Bauhaus, 1937.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the Bauhaus instruction is that was built on the apprenticeship model common in trade, designed by Gropius to avoid producing “starving geniuses”.
The three-year program built on the Vorkurs by adding specialized instruction in the workshops, and ended in an apprenticeship examination conducted at the local chamber of trade.
In addition, Gropius eschewed the title “professor” for his academic instructors in favor of Meister (master), and paired them as instructors on an equal footing with masters from industry. Select students were accepted into the advanced master program (again industrial master, not to be confused with the academic master), with the expectation that they would in due time replenish the ranks of the faculty.
This is so completely out of sync with current practice in economics, it's almost comical.
Sadly it's also no longer a feasible setup. Social prestige has shifted so much in favor of university degrees that a restarted Bauhaus offering credentials on the same level would be hard-pressed to attract students. (The successor Bauhaus University in Weimar offers the standard range of academic degrees and a standard academic curriculum.)
But nevermind the propensity of contemporary economics programs to produce geniuses with advanced postsecondary degrees (although no longer starving thanks to lucrative job offers in tech) rather than graduates that demonstrate mastery of the operational practicalities of their domain, the more interesting question both for this post and for future posts in this newsletter is which parts of the Bauhaus instructional setup could be reused and reshaped to teach economics, and how.
Stone, wood, metal, clay, glass, color, textiles, and… utility?
Looking at the famous diagram by Walter Gropius, which puts the building in the center of all design efforts, this question becomes “what is the equivalent of the building in economics?”, inevitably followed by “what is the study of nature, of materials etc.?”, and ultimately, “what’s the economic equivalent of stone, wood, metal, clay, glass, color, and textiles?”
In part we can answer this because for some of these things there are obvious parallels. The study of construction and representation (in other words, descriptive geometry) is likely the field that has the closest analogue in economics, even if the mathematical fields central to economic inquiry are usually real analysis and calculus.
Where they overlap is in the design of load-bearing structures, even though the definition of what is a structure and what is load-bearing differ significantly. The “space” to study in architecture is almost inevitably the three-dimensional vector space while in economics vector spaces can easily be multidimensional — or might not even be Euclidean at all. (I will spend more time on the intersection between mathematics and architecture in the upcoming newsletter on Christopher Alexander.)
Which brings us to a fundamental difference between the materials of the Bauhaus students and the “materials” economists get to play with. With the notable exception of color, the materials of the Bauhaus are physical and haptic. Economic “materials” are by and large abstract and mathematical.
In the same sense that architects design physical marketplaces, warehouses or town squares, economists deal with the version where everything is abstracted away but the mathematical expression of goods and payment flows, all down to the purely imaginary edifices that are central to economic reasoning: utility and equilibrium.
Design theory — especially industrial design and architecture — takes physical objects, abstracts away from them in order to detect and describe patterns of best practices, and puts them back together in the form of physical objects that more or less adhere to these practices. Economic theory and economic design reside almost entirely in the abstract world even though whichever best practices they concoct will inevitably have ramifications in the physical world.
This is a bit of a cognitive hurdle to overcome, and I also believe this drives the gap between the type of students a design school attracts compared to an economics department. But I consider this chasm is largely artificial, and in no small part driven by an economics curriculum hell-bent on suppressing creative engagement with the material — and materials.
The liminal space between the two is big enough — and unexplored enough — to be worth investigating on its own, especially with the goal to educate design practitioners rather than academics.
It helps that much of economics is already at least implicitly architectural. One of my favorite fundamental patterns is “a market is just an intersection with a lot and a fence”, mostly because it occupies this liminal space. It works both as a starting point for designing physical markets, from farmer’s markets in quaint town squares to shopping malls to e-commerce websites, and for their economic counterparts.
Somehow I have to consider bringing two flows (typically merchandize and payment flows) together in the same space, but I also have to provide storage and protection for both. Economists and architects will inevitably branch off in very different directions from here, but this pattern succinctly encapsulates the common ground between the two.
Commerce is increasingly moving online, and it’s no coincidence that Amazon employs an army of economists as well as architects. Warehouses and fulfillment centers might not be most glamorous assignments for an architect to take on, but they require a high level of technological competence — and they form the backbone of the cybernetic economy.
So then what are the things we can already pencil in as the equivalent to stone, wood, metal, etc. in our economic design curriculum?
Some of them I’ve already mentioned. There is the pattern of “stocks, flows, transformations” from the cybernetic economy. There are individuals and their beliefs, there is the economy as a fabric of value chains, integrated into organizations where beliefs align and disintegrated where they collide.
There is Joe Bain’s triple of “structure, conduct, performance”, interpreted more generally as “under which external conditions do which actions lead to which observable outcomes?” There are economic engines and governance mechanisms, assembled to scale fundamental activities like replacement and scheduling to enable complex social orders.
There are economic structures, the market as exchange mechanism foremost among them. There are networks, hierarchies, clusters, as social forms. There are social objectives: efficiency, accountability, integrity. There is an express need for planning, modelling, and predicting.
Economic design is a discipline different from economic theory and econometrics, even if it draws on both. The Bauhaus curriculum as a design paradigm can give us first pointers on how to teach it. Architecture is always economic in the same sense as economics is always architectural.