Collective Living (Kolektivni Bydleni 1)

Architecture was central to the utopian vision of modernism in the interwar period. The so-called New Building in Germany and Czechoslovakia did not disguise architectural components with applied ornament. The need to strip architectural ornament was in part an attempt to rid architecture of symbolic imagery bearing associations of class and nationalistic difference.  

But there is an aesthetic, even moral, dimension to this position: the desire to see beyond the surface and expose the “reality” or “truth” of the structure inside. As such, post-war architectural transparency recalls the metaphysics of The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) Expressionism, and the small, but influential group of Expressionistic architects active around 1920 in such short-lived activist groups as the Berlin-based Workers’ Council for Art (Arbeitsrat für Kunst), including Walter Gropius, founding director of the Bauhaus.