Editor’s letter, October 2009

Editorial Staff Opinion

A few months ago Eleanor Gustafson and I spent a day as guests of Historic New England. We had wanted to see what I like to think of as the bookends of that organization’s historic houses­—the 1938 Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with its spare, modernist decor and bracing use of industrial materials, and the rambling, mysterious Beauport in Gloucester, …

Design and reform: the making of the Bauhaus

Editorial Staff Art

October 2009 | In our time  the name Bauhaus has become a synonym for high modernism, a stand-in for the purist design language of the years between the two world wars and beyond. For many it is now a stylistic descriptor, a sort of shorthand for a specific look, often understood without any temporal attachment or historical meaning. But the …