The architecture of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, from objectivity to revolution

This thesis aims to demonstrate (hypothesis) that the building of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm is of the swiss architect and artist Max Bill, despite so. This paradox is a figure of thought in which there is an apparent incompatibility, which will be resolved in the development of the thesis with a deeper analysis of the states. Max Bill is not the author of the building of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG). The most accurate statement would be that Bill absorbed or allowed to pass through himself the language of architecture, language that does not belong to him and that applies in Ulm in very specific conditions. Why “in spite of being” because despite not being –or to be architect like the first Mies or Corbu were – introduces a spatial conception, as an artist, already he belonged. Max Bill will think the HfG space as a topological space, understood it as a mathematical structure that allows the formal definition of concepts such as convergence, connectivity, sustainability, neighbourhood. Why has the Max Bill building attracted and arouse interest in the world of architecture? Why has it been mythologized? Actually what Max Bill makes is put on the table revolutionary themes like the infinite-finite referred to a non-Euclidean but topological space. In 1949 Bill published a text entitled: “Die Kunst der mathematische Denkweise in unserer Zeit” leaving very clear his intellectual position. For him the artists came to constructivism, in a needed reducionist way in order to link art with society. However, mathematics, in their advance got to a point where they lost clearly, the boundaries became blurred. The mathematical conception of art of the fifties is not in a strict mathematical sense. Hardly it served what was meant by exact mathematics. In the opinion of Bill, the Euclidean geometry retained only a limited effect for the scientists of the twentieth century, and therefore, its importance should be relative to the art. The principle of finite infinity, became an indispensable and vital resource for mathematical and physical thinking. This is the thought site in where Bill was when he returns in the fall of 1952 to his study in Zurich. There he worked for seven months, with little contact with the circle of Ulm, with whom he had developed, in close collaboration, all drafts. On May 5, 1953, after more than half a year, the official request was made to build the school in Ulm. This contained a location map (1: 500), as well as ten building plans (1: 100). It would fail to solve some fundamental questions in order to rise the event up, why in Ulm? Why Max Bill? The origin of the school is from a physically and morally devastated Germany after the end of World War II. The choice of Ulm by the Americans and in particular by Shepard Stone, American high commissioner in occupied Germany, is based on an ideological and territorial strategy: to the south, in Ulm, there was a foundation (Geschwister-Sholl-Stifftung) created from the murders of two young people, who belonged to the internal resistance to Nazism, by the Nazis. This foundation and a group of intellectuals from Ulm (Ulmer Kreis) created a Volkshochschule or a school to teach elderly people without training. The Americans propose them to transform it into a Hochschule (College), within their anti-Nazi re-educational politic. The Americans did not want a dean for this new school that could have the minimal connection with Nazism. Due to variety circumstances detailed in the thesis Max Bill appeared on the scene. He was Swiss and an internationally recognized artist. Max Bill designed and built the new building in the middle of this circunstances, turning it slowly in the crystallizer element of a revolution towards a more just, equitable and peaceful society. Neither calculated art nor geometric art the thesis attempts to transform an objectivity in a reasoning that lights on a way of conceiving the absolutely new architectural space, that today we recognize in some of the most paradigmatic of contemporary buildings. More than the work of a creator, is the representation of a collective thought, where the architect acts almost as a medium of a community.