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.In 1911, when Gropius compiled a photo album of works of modern architecturefor the German art historian Karl-Ernst Osthaus, he included a number of Americanexamples, including the grain silos of the Midwest.Gropius saw the aesthetic qualityin their entirely functionally determined and industrial form, devoid of any traditionalelements, as the embodiment of the American zeitgeist determined by machines, themasses, and mass transit.In the fourteen examples he included in his 1913 essay for theGerman Werkbund, he tried to show spiritual affinities between the North Ameri-can industrial buildings of that time and his own works.In his own architecture, how-ever, Gropius did attempt to ennoble the purely functional by means of art andmonumentalization.26American influence also appeared in other ways in the works of Gropius andMies.Both came to know and draw inspiration from the work of Frank Lloyd Wrightthrough the edition of Wright s oeuvre by Ernst Wasmuth in 1911, the first compre-21 Douglas Haskell, The German Architects, 449.22 Hans Vaget, Edgar Hoover s Thomas Mann. 23 Lee Gray, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in the FBI Files, 146.In later years, thediscussion of certain Bauhaus architects would be extended to accusations of National Socialistsympathizing.24 G.Muche, Das künstlerische Werk, quoted in Schädlich, Die Beziehungen des Bauhauses zuden USA. 25 Irving K.Pond, High Buildings and Beauty, 182.On the occasion of the competition, LouisSullivan also spoke of the conviction that a foreigner should possess the insight required topenetrate to the depths of the sound, strong, kindly and aspiring idealism which lies at the coreof the American people: one day to make them truly great sons of the Earth. Sullivan, TheChicago Tribune Competition, 156.26 Winfried Nerdinger, Walter Gropius, 9ff. 212 AGAINST THE ODDS: THE RESOLUTION OF CONTRADICTIONShensive publication about the eminent American architect.27 The Berlin publisher hada stand at the St.Louis world s fair in 1904 and had established his contact withWright on that occasion.The 1923 Sommerfeld house by Gropius and Adolf Meyer ishard to imagine without Wright s precedents; the same is true for the open plans andflowing spaces of the two country houses in concrete and brick by Mies, designed in1923 and 1924.In terms of their building typology and ambitions, the two utopianglass skyscrapers of 1921 and 1922 continued in the American tradition.The horizon-tality displayed in other important works by both architects, and which was absorbedin the definition of the International Style, may be found as a formal element in Ameri-can architecture, for example, in the long rows of closely spaced windows of manywarehouses and in the facades of the Chicago school.In Gropius s case, the influencewas also explicit in his housing concepts.A lecture entitled The House in EightDays, which he gave in Berlin in March 1926, indicates that his own thoughts onserial production were based on American precedents both typologically and in theirprimary aim.28Certain building technologies from the United States also were integrated intothe work of the German architects, such as the use of steel frame construction as devel-oped in the Chicago school.Another commonality was the interest in the theories ofFrederick Winslow Taylor on scientific management and the analyses of Frank B.Gilbreth on the efficient organization of the work process.The move toward rational-ization, mechanization, and scientific experimentation in the technology and construc-tion methods used in skyscraper building was also of mutual concern.The affirmationof technology implicit in Fordism hardly surpassed that of the Bauhaus after 1923.Around the same time as Albert Kahn s sober, functionalist River Rouge factory inDearborn was erected and Charles Sheeler was painting his unpeopled and preciseimages celebrating the aesthetic of the machine, the Weimar Bauhaus was undergoingits transformation into a pioneering institute, cross-fertilizing art and technology in anexperimental design laboratory.The anonymization and secularization evident in thespirit of industrially and economically aspiring postwar America was equally presentin Germany.In Ludwig Mies van der Rohe s opinion:The whole trend of our time.is toward the secular.The endeavors of the mystics willbe remembered as mere episodes.Despite our greater understanding of life, we shallbuild no cathedrals.Nor do the brave gestures of the romantics anything to us [sic], forbehind them we detect the empty form.The individual is losing significance; hisdestiny is no longer what interests us.The decisive achievements in all fields are imper-sonal, and their authors are for the most part obscure.They are part of the trend of ourtimes toward anonymity
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