OMAR AKBAR - MODERNISM DESTROYS URBAN FABRIC

Article about the battle over the "Ghosts of Bauhaus" from a 2002 edition of New York Times and an even better one in Metropolis Magazine

"An irreverent, humorous urban planner, Akbar wants the new Bauhaus to effect social change. He has developed planning projects as far flung as the slums of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the favelas of Rio de Janiero. His newest effort is an international building exhibition that he hopes will lead to the transformation of cities in the former East Germany, where planners are facing a new, severe problem of shrinking populations and empty buildings.

"The buildings here don't have people anymore," Akbar said. "We are trying to be creative and look at this as an opportunity rather than shrinkage. We want to involve the inhabitants, investors, scientists and economists." He added; "It is the ultimate test of less is more," referring to the mantra of the Bauhaus philosophy coined by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."

"...From 1919 to 1933, Germany was the hotbed of design, and a grouping of visionaries — Gropius and his successor, Mies van der Rohe, and the artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer, among others — started a revolution of sleek simplicity in everything from stacking chairs and lamps to stairwells and big buildings. They were the pioneers of clean design for a new century, an age of mass production and technology. Initially inspired by handicraft and textiles, the modernists later emphasized reason and science in architecture as well as social responsibility in planning..."

"...The Nazis considered the Bauhaus to be socialist in nature, and the communists considered it bourgeois. What started in Germany and became the basis for architecture and interiors around the world was for all intents and purposes abandoned here in what became East Germany. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to a re-examination of and a renewed interest in the Bauhaus..."

"... Born in Afghanistan to an aristocratic family — his grandfather advised King Mohammed Zaher Shah's father — Akbar moved to Germany as a child when his father was offered a scholarship to study, and he was raised by his German stepmother.

Akbar thinks his name and heritage do not help him. "My name is a problem. I have nothing directly to do with the history of Germany, and it wasn't my Bauhaus." His critics refer to him loosely as a Turk, Iranian or Arab. Most important, he said, they do not see him as German and he is not a modernist. "Not a day goes by when we don't receive a letter or e-mail voicing some discontent," he said, noting that much of it involves personal attacks on him. He has tired of the maelstrom, but "no one can keep me from talking," he said."

"He is candid about what he calls Gropius's autocratic style and the ways in which classical modernist principles, such as pushing entry ways to the side of large, single-use structures, "destroyed the quality of the urban fabric."