From the Red House to the Bauhaus
Red House
Can anything relevant to socialism be found in the design and construction of the Red House designed in 1859 for William Morris and his family by the architect Philip Webb? The house is seen as the precursor for the Arts and Crafts movement and its name derived from the red brick used in its construction.
The finance for the project came from money inherited from Morris's wealthy family. The Red House used local craftsmen and local materials - hand-made bricks, clay roof tiles and English Oak. The steep roofs, prominent chimneys, cross gables and exposed ceiling beams looks back to Gothic architectural design. The quality of craftsmanship, particularly the skill of the brick layers and the roof tilers shine though. They may have been paid labourers working under the direction of a contractor but they still produced a beautiful building.
Red House is a nod to the writings of John Ruskin. Morris was influenced by the writings of the art critic, John Ruskin, being particularly inspired by his chapter "On the Nature of Gothic Architecture" in the second volume of THE STONES OF VENICE. Ruskin had written:
"We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity".
This passage was a critique on the division of labour and a general attack on 19th century capitalism. Ruskin was no socialist, but he was perspicuous enough to know what capitalism was doing to the working class in terms of workmanship.
The attention to craftsmanship at the Red House was a way of working totally at odds with the mechanization of the designs that had recently been shown at the Hyde Park Exhibition of 1851. This can be seen is Webb's working drawings now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Morris visited the Exhibition about the same time as Marx. Marx had already anticipated the Exhibition as "a bourgeois collection of world commodities similar to the Gods contained within the Roman Pantheon" (NEUE RHEINISCHE ZEITUNG, Issue 5-6, 1850).
Morris's visit to the Exhibition was of a more physically violent kind. Having attended the Exhibition with his parents he was forced to enter Paxton's cast iron and plate glass building to look at the "immense collection of commodities" gathered within it. He did not enjoy the experience leaving quickly to throw-up in disgust in the adjoining vegetation (Jeanne Willette, ARTS AND CRAFTS MEETS THE MACHINE, 2018).
What of Paxton's pre-fabricated building which stood is sharp contrast to the vernacular design of the Red House? The introduction of the sheet method into Britain by Chance Brothers in 1832 made possible the production of large sheets of cheap but strong glass, and its use in the Crystal Palace created a structure with the greatest area of glass ever seen in a building. It astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights.
Marx made no comment on the structure of the building although he and Engels had previously noted that capitalism had "accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids. Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals..." (THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND THE LAST HINDRED YEARS, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1948, p.63). This raises an interesting question. What, architecture had capitalism produced by 1848 which could have equalled or surpassed those found in previous social systems? We do not know? We can only guess.
Surely not the factories which littered Northern England, of which, Marx remarked, had systematically robbed what was necessary for the life of the worker; space, light, air and protection against the dangers of the production process (CAPITAL VOLUME 1, Machinery and Large-Scale Industry p 552-553).
Marx was aware of the Lancashire mills, writing extensively of their workings. Richard Arkwright's Cromfield mill in Derbyshire, the birth-place of the factory system, for example, was the prototype for all other mills, even as far away as Germany. The structure is hardly a "wonder of architecture" on par with the flying buttresses and fan vaults of medieval cathedrals. Stark and utilitarian, the building exploited workers employed there in twelve hours shifts. "Dark Satanic mills" comes to mind. Marx did not comment on the quality of the architecture of the Lancashire Mills. Instead he saw them as places of class exploitation, class struggle and the production of surplus value (see CAPITALVOLUME 1, Machinery and Large-scale Industry, section 4 The Factory pp 544 - 575).
Marx and Engels most probably had in mind railway stations like the arch at Euston Station designed by Philip Hardwick and built in 1834 with its austere Greek Doric columns almost 13 metres tall. The arch was demolished in 1961 but will be rebuilt as part of the Euston station redevelopment once High Speed 2 has been completed. Then there were the vast structures of iron and glass housing locomotives and the brick aqueducts over which trains passed, like the Ouse Valley Viaduct, designed by John Rastrick, which carries the London to Brighton railway line.
Marx and Engels had seen the railways in a positive light. Class unity for the working class was to be through "improved means of communication". In the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO they mentioned the railways as the means of unifying workers, although, writing today they would probably have added the internet and social media (pp 68-69).
Morris had seen the Crystal Palace exhibition as a symbol of vulgar industrialisation based on the hideous utilitarianism of the factory system, and the dehumanization of the workers by the machine. In adopting a style of the Middle Ages, Morris used Red House as a visual Manifesto for architectural design and the work of craftsmen: workers who did their own thinking, whose hand and brain worked together to produce an object of beauty.
The crudity of the designs exhibited at the Exhibition won out. Machine production was increasingly used to devalue and supplant craftsmanship. And the design produced by Morris's own firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. could only be afforded by the rich. Morris was well aware of the shortcoming of craftsmen competing with machinery. He recognised that art production would remain the escapist pleasure of the rich until there was socialist change. This point was made by Morris in a lecture he gave to the Trades Guild in London, entitled The Lesser Arts:
"Unless something or other is done to give all men some pleasure for the eyes and rest for the mind in the aspect of their own and their neighbours' houses, until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly cultivated men, who can go often to beautiful places, whose education enables them, in the contemplation of the past glories of the world, to shut out from their view the everyday squalors that the most of men move in" (December 1877).
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/the-lesser-arts-william-morris/
The Bauhaus
Architecture is the most social of the arts and crafts and the design and construction of a building involves many different workers telling us a lot about the society in which buildings take place; the way society organises itself and the forces that drive it. Augustus Pugin, who designed most of the detailing at the House of Commons, once wrote: "the history of architecture is the history of the world" (A. W. Pugin, APOLOGY FOR THE PRESENT OF CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND (1843) quoted in Raymond Williams, CULTURE AND SOCIETY 1750-1950, 1932 ed).
When Walter Gropius opened the State Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, he announced in his program: "Every person of good repute is accepted as an apprentice, regardless of age and gender, whose talent and previous training [are] considered sufficient by the Master Council."
The Bauhaus is radically different in style to the Red House. The Bauhaus, with its clean lines, flat roof, and white and grey rendered facade looks to the future and a global, international style of architecture. Among the innovative methods used in its construction were a steel frame-work, re-inforced concrete bricks, large expanses of glazing, and flat roofs covered with asphalt tiles that could be walked on.
Unlike Ruskin and Morris, who looked back to the Cathedrals of the past, Gropius looked to the "Cathedral of the future" represented in Lyonel Feininger's 1919 black and white woodcut. Feininger's woodcut appeared on the cover of the Bauhaus manifesto, representing the utopian vision of the school as a "Cathedral of Socialism."
It was Oskar Schlemmer, one of the teachers at the Bauhaus, who referred to the Bauhaus, in 1923, as the "cathedral of socialism" in a hastily retracted exhibition guide. The word "socialism" was a touch-paper to the conservative politics of the time.
Opposition to the Bauhaus began immediately in Dessau and then later in Weimer. Local conservative politicians disliked the schools hostility towards "traditional values". They held a deep prejudice against the strange, androgynous students, their foreign teachers, their wild parties and degenerate house band that played jazz and Slavic folk music. Tabloid newspapers and conservative politicians tapped into this radical cosmopolitism denouncing the Bauhaus for its "decadence", "Jewishness" and "Bolshevism".
The DAILY MAIL-like rants were common place, until eventually the Bauhaus teachers and students were hounded out of Weimer to Berlin where they were to be finally closed in 1933 through increasing harassment by the fascists. The Bauhaus is still derided by conservative and reactionary journalists who hate its "internationalism" (see FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE (1981) by John Wolfe). Wolfe believed that any successful architect went from owning one Mies van der Rohe designed Barcelona chair to owning four.
Not that there were problems with the internal politics of the Bauhaus. Gropius and other artists were steeped in the anti-Semitism of the time, while the second director of the Bauhaus. Hans Meyer formed a "red brigade" with students to help build Stalin's dictatorship at the height of the show trials, while one former architectural student, Fritz Ertl, went on to become a high-ranking architect, responsible for the expansion of Auschwitz and who designed the gas chambers. His architectural drawings for the concentration camp euphemistically showed the gas chambers as "shower rooms". Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus, ended his career designing for the rich and powerful in the United States and for the Bacardi family just prior to the Cuban revolution.
The artists and students assembled at the Bauhaus hoped to be a force that would change society and shape a modern human environment. There was an attempt to eliminate competitive tendencies and to foster individual creative potential and a sense of community and shared purpose. In a world hurtling towards the Second World War, such an attempt was futile.
The Bauhaus, like the Red House, was a heroic architectural failure. What it wanted to achieve could never go beyond the capitalist society in which it found itself. It carried a germ of possibilities which a future socialist society might find useful in the unification of design and machine production but buildings in socialism will no doubt come out of the needs of socialist society and will be as different as the Bauhaus was to the Cathedrals and Pyramids of the past.
Who Built the Red House and the Bauhaus?
Nothing is said by Morris of the workers who actually built the Red House. We know the name of the building contractor, William Kent (Fiona McCarthy, WILLIAM MORRIS A LIFE FOR OUR TIME, 1994). However, we do not know who the individual workmen are. They have been erased from history. They do not appear in the National Trust booklet; only the architect and client. No one seems to care.
The same applies to the Bauhaus. We know the architect but not the names of those workers who transported the material to the building works, dug the foundations, constructed the steel frame, poured the concrete and constructed the glazed screens. A world heritage building but not for those who built it.
Fine Art had long depicted workers labouring. Ford Madox Brown’s "Work" (1852-65), has the conservative Thomas Carlyle appearing in the painting along with women distributing temperance leaflets. Brown was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and a business partner of William Morris. Photography gives us some idea of the workers who actually built the buildings with their brain, muscle and hands. A useful collection of photographs of 19th century building sites and the workers who worked on them is held by The Construction History Society in the department of architecture at Cambridge University.
The only literary representation building workers at the time received was in THE RAGGED-TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS (1911), written by Robert Tressell. Unlike Thomas Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE (1894), who wanted to escape being a stone mason into an Oxford College, Tressell wanted his workers to escape from capitalism to socialism. Tressell paints the construction workers as "philanthropists" who throw themselves into back-breaking work for poverty wages to generate profit for their employers. Tressell related his workers to society as a whole. These workers labour in a house known as the "cave", a symbolic reference to Plato's cave in which the masses are chained by their ignorance to the darkness of their own making. To leave the house means leaving capitalism. Frank Owen takes the place of Socrates; Socialism instead of justice. In repairing the house rather than leaving it the workers just perpetuate the system that exploits them.
Berthold Brecht was to highlight the invisible workers who built the temples, the palaces and the grand houses in a poem called Questions from the worker who read.
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?
QUESTIONS FROM A WORKER WHO READS (1935).
Workers who make things, socially and co-operatively, who put them together and then form an artefact are denied authorship. They are forgotten, ignored and overlooked. The only stamp of importance is the commodities price.
Commodity Fetishism
Despite Ruskin, Morris and Gropius all wanting to see the development of creative labour, with craftsman using their skill to produce beautiful and satisfying objects, the limitations imposed of this being possible under capitalism derives from two interrelated realities. First, the workers had to sell what Marx called their "labour-power" as a commodity and, second, what workers produce in the working day is also a commodity, to be sold on the market for a profit.
The workers who built the Red House and the Bauhaus had to sell their ability to work as a commodity. The various craftsmen were employees whose ability to work was bought and sold on the labour market in exchange for a wage. The building materials used in the construction of the buildings was an array of commodities: the sand, the tiles, the bricks and the timber. And the final building was a commodity.
Under capitalism we live in a world of commodities. Commodities have a use value and an exchange value. It is the exchange value of a commodity that carries its real importance for the seller: the realisation of the sale of the commodity as profit. Red House and the Bauhaus are fetishized by what they signify in terms of exchange rather than the labour which went into their production. The social qualitative and quantitative relationship which existed between labourers and owners is obscured. It cannot be seen. It is deemed socially unimportant.
Under capitalism workers generate value through the expenditure of socially necessary labour time which goes into the commodities production. Workers not only generate value which pays for the necessaries they and their families need to live on but a surplus value which is the source of the employers’ unearned income of rent, interest and profit.
Marx's commodity fetishism is informed by his theory of value. The labour theory of value derives from the conflict between the forces of production, including co-operative and social labour, and the class relations of production under capitalism. Marx introduced his theory of commodity fetish in the chapter of the first volume of CAPITAL, section 4 The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret pp 163-177, Penguin ed, 1996)
As Marx put it: a commodity
"...is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things" (p. 165).
Fetishism for Marx
"...attaches itself to the products of labour, as soon as they are produced as commodities"
As commodities, different forms of human labour become exchangeable for each other as values. Commodity fetishism is specific to capitalism. Marx writes:
"The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes, therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production".
And one of Marx's illustrations was a socialist society. In a "community of free individuals" who carry on their work with the means of production in common, "and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full awareness as one single social labour force" (p.171) commodity fetishism no longer exists. Labour becomes transparent; the expenditure of work is no longer a commodity.
This would have a revolutionary bearing on Ruskin's Venice, Morris's Red House and Gropius's Bauhaus. Work by an "