Moholy-Nagy's Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-46)

Abstract

1) A good example of this situation is the CIRA Conference held in January 1989 under the title: Design at the Crossroads, CIRA Seminar Series Monograph 2 (Evanston: Northwestern University, May 1989). Anybody who has been confronted with design education would readily admit that proposing a satisfactory definition of design is a rather risky, if not impossible, enterprise. Its definition indeed depends on whether design is considered to be an idea, a knowledge, a project, a process, a product, or even a way-of-being. Its fundamental characteristics may also vary according to the historical and geographical, that is, cultural context. Nevertheless, this endemic philosophical impasse has neither impeded the expansion and the sophistication of the design professions (graphic, industrial, architectural design, and so forth) in the twentieth century, nor the proliferation of theoretical treatises on design in the past two or three decades.1 The situation becomes more problematic, however, when it comes to defining what design education could and should be. Indeed, it would be rather odd to imagine that a reliable design education program could be put together without an underlying model of design. Actually, these models usually do exist but rarely, if ever, are they explicit or conscious. Whatever they may or may not be, they have one characteristic in common: they insist upon the multidisciplinary nature of design and they consider that design is to be found somewhere at the intersection of technology, art, and science. As a consequence, any design school will have a curriculum reflecting these various disciplines. The German Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, represents an important and significant endeavor toward devising both a general definition of design and a method of design education in the twentieth century. Although Gropius resigned in 1928 and the Bauhaus was closed in 1933, it was to be reborn in 1937 in Chicago under the name of the New Bauhaus. The purpose of this essay is to propose a critical survey of the pedagogical method developed by Moholy-Nagy, founder and first director of the American Bauhaus in Chicago, from the original principles of the Bauhaus. This method will be validated by placing it in a more general philosophical context, namely Goethe's Naturphilosophie and Dewey's pragmatics. In the conclusion, this article shall draw some consequences regarding