On minimalism, Bauhaus and Max Bill

I don't know if there is a style of design that is more divisive among the watch enthusiasts community than minimalism. It seems that there's plenty of people out there willing to fetch the pitchforks and torches at a moment notice once they hear that there's a Bauhaus in town.

For them a Bauhaus watch is synonym with laziness and plagiarism. Take a round something, slap on it a blank dial with no real indices, add a set of thin and simple hands, top it with some crystal and you have a brand new minimalist watch to sell to the next round of suckers who are looking to get a "Bauhaus" watch.

And they may not be wrong about it but it doesn't necessarily makes them right, because although there is an overlap between minimalism and Bauhaus, this is not a perfect match and it's more the result of causality rather than intention.

To explain why minimalism isn't synonymous with Bauhaus and why not every Bauhaus "thingy" needs to be minimalist we have to think about the where and when the Bauhaus movement started and what it tried to achieve.

I'll keep it short because Wikipedia is this way. Postwar 1919 Germany was in shambles and those who came back from the trenches wanted a clean break and a chance for a fresh start. One of the concept that came out from this was the idea of unifying art and craft and using technology to bring it to the masses. The problem was that the technology to reproduce on a larger scale the fancy designs of La Belle Époque simply didn't exist yet.

Germans priding themselves on being rational looked for solutions to this problem and decided that it could be resolved by substituting the intricate decorations with simpler geometric designs, and that careful calculations of ratio and the choice of elements will produce products that will be both pleasing to the eye and easier to manufacture.

This paring of decorations resulted in designs that were simpler, cleaner, and lacking anything that was deemed superfluous or hard to reproduce on a manufacturing line.

Therefore minimalism was a result from such designs but it was not the goal per se. A better technology or manufacturing capabilities might have resulted in completely different approaches.

Bauhaus wasn't so widely accepted in Germany as people think. For example it didn't really invade all aspects of consumer goods and even in architecture it became better accepted in Israel than Germany, at least proportionally to the number of buildings built at the time.

It also had a relatively short lifespan since the Nazi who took power in 1933 were more interested in building colossal pseudo neo classical BS, and were highly suspicious of a bunch of intellectuals brewing dangerously non conformist ideas in their degenerate's den.

Max Bill himself wasn't German but Swiss. He did learn at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, but wisely decided to return to Zurich in 1929. Max Bill was very influential in post WW2 and though his ideas about the use of color and geometric designs were based on the Bauhaus school, not everything he did was necessarily easy to manufacture (e.g. Continuity).

Or affordable to the masses, which brings us back to the Junghans Max Bill Bauhaus that I own, which judging by its RSP is absolutely not a product for the masses.

So, is a DW a better Bauhaus product than my Max Bill Bauhaus? You can't argue with the appeal of cheap mass production, but the problem here is with "cheap". The Junghans is expensive but it's also the product of a careful design, it's well manufactured, and it's built to last. It's a quality product. The DW has no such redeeming qualities, IMO. It's minimalist in the same way that a tricycle is minimalist car, and it's not a Bauhaus design by any metric you care to use.

I'm happy with my Max Bill, even if it's not 100% Bauhaus.