Zeynep Çelik Alexander is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. Her work focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the Enlightenment. After training as an architect at Istanbul Technical University and Harvard Graduate School of Design, she received her PhD from the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT. Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (2017), a history of an alternative mode of knowing—non-propositional, non-linguistic, and based on the movements of the body—that gained saliency in the nineteenth century and informed the epistemological logic of modernism in the German-speaking world. She has published in numerous venues, including Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, New German Critique, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, e-flux, Grey Room, Journal of Design History, and Centropa. A second volume, co-edited with John J. May (Harvard University) and forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, examines the histories of a series of techniques that have come to dominate contemporary design disciplines. She is currently at work on a new book that explores nineteenth-century architectures of bureaucracy from the Kew Herbarium to the Larkin Administration Building. Çelik Alexander is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative and an editor of the journal Grey Room.
1919: The Turning Point at Which History Failed to Turn
In his account of the nineteenth century, the British historian G. M. Trevelyan described the momentous revolutions of 1848 as “the turning point at which history failed to turn.” If his verdict can be generalized, a revolution is, on the one hand, an abrupt change and, on the other, a return to a previous state. This paper attempts to understand the year 1919, the year of revolution that also witnessed the founding of the Bauhaus, in a similarly dialectic fashion. While countless historians have stressed the radical breaks between the Weimar Republic and Wilhelmine periods and between the Bauhaus and the art schools that preceded it, I will argue that the Bauhaus shared with its predecessors a nineteenth-century epistemological project that I call “kinesthetic knowing”: a non-discursive, non-conceptual way of knowing that was purported to compete in its rigor with reasoning realized through language, concepts, or logic. Among the many practices developed at the Bauhaus with this alternative mode of knowing, foremost was designing (Gestaltung), which redefined all artistic activity as the manipulation of form, line, and color. The Bauhaus thus continued, the paper contends, the nineteenth-century tradition of Bildung by stressing the importance of methodical introspection.