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Cultural Evolution, Social Physics, and Metaphysical Design
The Spiritual Vision of the Bauhaus
Trying to distill my fifty+ years on earth into an article about the evolution of design and my obsession with the Bauhaus to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Reprinted from my blog at stephenbau.com
Katy Payne spent decades listening to long living mammals as an acoustic biologist to discover the songs of whales and the passions and deep empathy of elephants. She draws on the Quaker tradition for her understanding of the world of the social lives of animals as her church.
The Bauhaus began with the metaphor of a church and the Lyonel Feininger depiction of a modern cathedral as a symbol for a new faith in the synthesis of art and technology. It continues to be a powerful symbol of the influence of ideas about art and science through cultural evolution and social physics. One hundred years since Walter Gropius published the founding manifesto, the idea of the Bauhaus holds hope for a new iteration of the movement in a renaissance of its original focus on metaphysical design.
Cultural Evolution
In the past five decades that I have been listening to humans as a sort of armchair…
