The "Old" Unity Of Art And Technolody

The Bauhaus achieved a new unity of art and technology,and this unity was not achieved overnight.The British Arts and Crafts Movement that happened before it was actually the source of the Bauhaus.The British Arts and Crafts Movement was a design reform movement that began in the mid-nineteenth century.This movement is of great significance as a reflection on the mass production of machinery during the Industrial Revolution.In this movement,reformers,dissatisfied with shoddy industrial products,hoped to revive medieval handicraft to compete with mechanical production.However,in the Western world since the seventeenth century,art has gradually become synonymous with fine arts,which includes more aesthetic considerations,and is separated from handicrafts,and the social status of artists has gradually been higher than that of ordinary craftsmen.This has led to the withdrawal of excellent artists from the field of handicrafts,and the design quality of handicrafts cannot be guaranteed.Therefore,while emphasizing the importance of handicrafts,the reformers were also striving to eliminate the boundaries between artists and craftsmen and hope to improve handicraft design quality with the help of the combination of art and craft.In the process,reformers both formed a rich theory and carried out a lot of practices.And these theories and practices laid a solid foundation for the Bauhaus to achieve a new unity.On the theoretical side,the reformers emphasized the importance of craftsmanship,which was advocated by Gropius,the founder of the Bauhaus.If the Bauhaus erased the boundaries between artists,craftsmen and industry,then the great achievement of the British Arts and Crafts Movement was to erase the boundaries between artists and craftsmen in advance.And in this movement,the architect Pugin unearthed the ideas of functionalism and material rationalism from the medieval Gothic architecture,which coincided with the idea of the combination of architectural form and practical function advocated by Bauhaus.And the medieval workshop-style teaching method adopted by the Bauhaus was actually emphasized as early as in this movement.In terms of practice,the reformers of the British Arts and Crafts movement took the lead in promoting the combination of arts and crafts.Later,with the development of the movement,some reformers realized that it would not work to exclude industry blindly,so they carried out an attempt to combine design with industry.These all paved the way for the Bauhaus to finally achieve the true unity of art and industrial technology.In this movement,art and technology achieved the “old” unity,and the “old” unity has two layers of meaning: first,the combination of arts and crafts advocated by the movement achieved the unification of art and traditional technology,which is the first layer of the “old”unity;Secondly,because the theory and practice in the movement laid a solid foundation for the establishment of Bauhaus,Bauhaus finally achieved the new unity of art and technology,which was the second layer of the “old” unity.Although this movement has achieved extraordinary achievements,it also has its own limitations of the times.For example,the movement emphasizes that manual labor is superior to mechanical production,because human beings become a part of a machine and lose their sense of happiness.And today,some types of mechanization have freed operators from monotonous tasks,freeing them up to pursue more fulfilling jobs.Therefore,we must be careful about our relationship with technology.Both art and technology are unique products of human society.No matter how the two interact,their significance needs to be pursued from promoting the development of human society in a better future.Therefore,only by insisting on serving the people and actively exploring the path of symbiosis can they obtain an infinite source of development.