Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.
Society needs a good image of itself. That is the job of the architect.
How can we expect our students to become bold and fearless in thought and action if we encase them in sentimental shrines feigning a culture which has long since disappeared?
The ultimate, if distant, aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art – the great structure – in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art.
The utilization of flat roofs as ‘grounds’ offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft.
The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art – sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts – as inseparable components of a new architecture.
Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.
Good architecture should be a projection of life itself, and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.
I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.
The development of the New Architecture encountered serious obstacles at a very early stage of its development. Conflicting theories and the dogmas enunciated in architects’ personal manifestos all helped to confuse the main issue.
Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.
Architects, sculptors painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a ‘profession.’ There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman.