Living Machines - Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology

E. Michael Jones

Ignatius Press

1995

128 páginas

4h 16m

ISBN-13: 9780898704648

Following up his best selling books Degenerate Moderns and Dionysos Rising, E. Michael Jones completes the trilogy as he reveals in this book how modern architecture arose out of disordered lives of its creators.

Beginning with the simultaneous collapse of both his marriage and the Austro-Hungarian empire, Walter Gropius began to formulate an architectural rhetoric that he felt would speak to the needs of the newly emerging modern man. As a sexually liberated social nomad, modern man would have no need for home or family, no need to be rooted in a particular time or place or family or soil or culture. He was to live henceforth in the "international style". Within a period, that deeply materialistic architectural vision would conquer the world.

From the suburbs of Moscow to the south side of Chicago, the new man would live in machines, living machines, to use Gropius' words. Jones' book, Living Machines is an explanation of where that vision came from, where it led, and why it ultimately failed.

"Socrates said that the order of the city was the order of the soul writ large. In other words, man's internal spiritual order, or disorder, is inevitably reflected outward in the political and cultural arrangement of his surroundings. In Living Machines, E. Michael Jones shows this to be no less true for modern architecture. Anyone who has stood dumbfounded before the sterility and ugliness of many modern buildings must have wondered what conception of humanity inspired these structures. Jones has the answers in the moral biographies of the seminal architectural revolutionaries of the 20th century. As Jones has shown in his other works, aesthetic revolutions are born of moral revolutions. As provocative as Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, Jones' book is far more profound. In his dissection of the spirit of modernity, Jones has again proven to be a master pathologist. This book should be read as part of a brilliant trilogy including Degenerate Moderns and Dionysos Rising." — Robert Reilly