ABSTRACT
One of the more strenuous examples of European Modernism between the wars is the Open Air School by Jan Duiker. The Dutch have never really given up the cause, and this school really demonstrates the skin-and-bones architecture can do while appearing to be doing nothing at all. The building appears almost transparent, indeed reduced to Hennebique structure itself, and merely sheathed and painted white. There weren't even radiators but only heated ceiling panels. The core of the building is the proud pipes capped with water tanks running vertically and wrapped with a staircase. Meanwhile, Walter Gropius took the directorship of the newly merged Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art, or Bauhaus, in 1919. Tony Garnier came up with an extraordinary set of drawings titled Une Cite Industrielle, a new vision for the city and certainly the opposite of that which those Mancunians were used to.
