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SHARED VISION: The Second American Bauhaus Paperback – January 1, 2012

5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

When Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, a member of the German Bauhaus, founded the Institute of Design in Chicago after World War II, a young sailer who had seen action in the Pacific enrolled. Inspired by Moholy's vision of design as a tool to change the world, Harold Cohen vowed to pursue it after Moholy's death in 1948. In the mid 1950s. Delyte Morris, the visionary and ambitious state college president in Southern Illinois, hired Cohen to do just that. Cohen's not-yet-famous friend, Buckminster Fuller, joined him in Carbondale, where their visions of a better world formed the second American Bauhaus.John McHale, British art and design critic described the SIU Design Department saying, "Housed in a collection of post-war temporary buildings, with four geodesic domes as workshop areas, one has the feeling that the whole school could be dismantled in a few hours, flown anywhere in the world, and be operative as an education and research tool immediately." Illustrated throughout. Includes 4 page color insert.
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Al Gowan's SharedVision is a valuable addition to the record of the influence of the Bauhaus in post-war America. His interviews with participants bring it alive."
-Robert Campbell, architect and Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic for The Boston Globe

"In this book Al Gowan brings to light a missing chapter in American design history. The people and events he includes were crucial to charting new directions for design in the United Statesand worldwide."
-Victor Margolin, Professor Emeritus of Design History Universityof Illinois, Chicago

About the Author

Al Gowan was in Harold Cohen's first class at Southern Illinois University on the day Buckminster Fuller walked into the lights. A practicing graphic designer and writer, Al taught at Indiana University, Purdue University, Boston University and is a professor emeritus of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His articles on design have appeared in PRINT and ID. He has also wrtten articles and fiction that have appeared in Yankee and Ploughshares. Gowan is also the author of NUTS & BOLTS: A Public Design Casebook and T.J. LYONS: A Biography and Crititcal Essay. His has published two novels, SANTIAGO RAG and ZAMORA'S TATTOO plus FORT MOMMA, a collection of short stories.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Merrimack Media (January 1, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 227 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1937504255
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1937504250
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.65 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

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The Bauhaus tradition moved from Chicago to Carbondale
5 out of 5 stars
The Bauhaus tradition moved from Chicago to Carbondale
Shared Vision is an important contribution to historical studies of the German Bauhaustradition in America. Author, Al Gowan traces the flow of people and ideas from Europe toAmerica; before, during, and after World War II. Chased out of Germany in the 1930s, WalterGropius landed in Boston while Laslo Moholy-Nagy went to Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago, Moholyfounded the New Bauhaus school of design.Walter Paepcke with the Container Corporation of America added his support in 1939. After WW IIthe Chicago School of Design was renamed the Institute of Design (ID) and Serge Chermayeffreplaced Moholy-Nagy as the ID chair. In the 1950s ID was folded into the Illinois Institute ofTechnology. A few years later, Chicago Bauhaus and Institute of Design staff and students, ledby Harold Cohen moved to Carbondale, Illinois and Southern Illinois University.In Carbondale, Harold Cohen and his former-ID cohorts, started a new design department expanding on Moholy-Nagy's Chicago ID model. Shared Vision explores the struggles and achievements of the Carbondale design department through interviews with 33 former students and 14 faculty members. Reproductions of documents and photographs from the 1955-1983 era are sprinkled throughout the interviews with a special section of color reproductions.
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2013
    This covers a very important and often missed moment in the history of modern design It should be read by anyone interested in the development of the modern movement.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2015
    In his collection of essays, "What Are People For?" American author Wendell Berry writes, “Culture preserves the map and the records of past journeys so that no generation so that no generation will permanently destroy the route.” Indeed if culture is recorded to allow past events and perspectives to positively inform and shape the future, than Shared Vision is an absolutely critical text. I believe this is indeed why Al Gowan put forth such great effort to compose a detailed, well-organized, comprehensive history of the Department of Design at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale Illinois. The book focuses on the years between 1955 through roughly 1983 when Design rejoined the Art Department and the last of the faculty members hired by Harold S. Cohen retired. Cohen founded the Department in 1955, and thus brought Lásló Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus philosophy south from Chicago’s Institute of Design to Carbondale.

    For newcomers, the Institute of Design or “New Bauhaus” is a school of design first founded in 1937 in Chicago by Moholy-Nagy, who was an original Bauhaus teacher in Germany between 1923–1928. In 1949 the Institute of Design became part of the new Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) university system and also the first institution in the United States to offer a PhD in design. The original Bauhaus was established in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as a school for art and design. As many Bauhaus architects and designers immigrated to the United States, they contributed significantly to the development of North American design practice and education. Their ideas were especially well received in Chicago.

    What happened next, and is so wonderfully chronicled in Shared Vision, equates to nothing less than an intellectual “perfect storm” comprised of radical thinkers, experimental culture, and open facilities that fostered an around the clock hub of thinking, making, learning, and perhaps most importantly a sharp focus on problem solving at multiple scales. Can “problem solving” be taught? This book proves it can and, (wisely) even traces the outcomes of the SIU students who have gone on to sustainably shape communities, systems, and organizations years before words like sustainability were even familiar. With luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller on board, “design,” as taught at SIU in those years was hardly concerned with style, but rather a rigorous understanding of how and why humans create, and what problems are worthy of our attention. Graduates emerged as problem solving “generalists” armed with informed intelligence, research and prototyping skills and well-trained creative aptitude.

    Glancing through the reviews several have remarked that this book is “well timed” and I absolutely could not agree further. According to recent study, current business executives believe that to successfully navigate an increasingly complex world we will need creativity, even more so than rigor, management, discipline, integrity or vision. In a time where so many of our systems, corporations, and institutions are broken, this book reminds us that we can extract and leverage missed clues from the past, helping to inform a new generation of problem seekers and creative problem solvers.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2013
    A very timely book

    To appraise Shared Vision: I should first disclose the author's and my career have been played out in similar fields and territories.
    I am an architect, trained at the AA in London, a unique institution that was founded by students in the 19th century, is still partially governed by its students and was dominated, during my time there, by Arthur Korn, a former Bauhaus teacher.
    I taught architectural design for 19 years in US and Canadian universities.
    My first appointment, as Instructor in Architecture, was at U of I Urbana, from 1957 to 1959 and my associate, teaching the Freshman class in Basic Design, was Carl Nelson, a former employee of Buckminster Fuller. Carl appears in several photographs in `Shared Vision', including the amazing cover illustration.
    In 1976 I quit full time teaching and moved to Nepal, where I ran an architectural practice for the following six years. My work there comprised mainly Medical Auxiliary Training Centers funded by a variety of foreign aid agencies: US, Canadian, German, Swiss, Chinese and UNICEF. The latter included solar thermal energy prototypes combining traditional methods with low cost materials of Indian manufacture.
    I share with SIU instructors the faith that the correct statement of the problem contains the seed of its own solution. I share also their social conscience which led them to seek out the greatest problems which of course did then, and still do, occur in the least developed countries, like Nepal, Haiti or Thailand.
    Southern Illinois University was even more important in the development of a modern philosophy of design than Al Gowan suggests. Its Bauhaus lineage was the soil in which the seeds of American pragmatism took root, through the genius of Harold Cohen and Buckminster Fuller, among others.
    Design principles such as exploring the greatest strength of a structure using the least amount of material were more fully developed at SIU than anywhere else.
    Such principles are deeply embedded in nature as exemplified by the posthumous discovery of a certain carbon molecule, rightly named Buckminsterfullerene.
    The world now desperately needs to turn towards, for example, closed loop systems of manufacture in which the so called `waste' products of one process provide input for another, as eco-systems naturally do.
    Al Gowan's documentation of the SIU - a center for study of `least waste' methodology - could not be more timely.
    David Dobereiner, (AA Dipl., MA)
    Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2012
    If you are a student looking for a college where you are encouraged to learn problem solving on your own, and to learn how to trust your own judgement, and draw information and ideas from virtually every field, read this book and weep for the death of the Design Department of Southern Illinois University. The book is a collection of memories of students and faculty from the Department of Design at Southern Illinois University from abut 1955-1975, and has photos and work examples. The intensity of the students' memories, and in particular, the testimony of students to how important the Department was to them is repeated on almost every page.

    However, there must still be colleges and grad schools where the same kind of experiential learning is a critical part of the course of study. The basic idea that students should get their hands dirty is too old to be stamped out completely. And one of the interesting features of the students' memories is that almost all of them found their way to the SIU Design Department either by trying to find a better place to learn on their own initiative, or by following some teacher's suggestion about where there was a sense of excitement in the learning process. In other words, the students' memories can also be read as a kind of "how to" book on finding a college that that respects and builds on individual initiative, as opposed to textbook learning.
    3 people found this helpful
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