Nearly every morning and some nights, my roommate and I go into Bauhaus books & coffee in Seattle’s Capitol Hill. It’s very well established in the neighborhood—people give directions to their apartments based on it, the books are old and gold-backed, the black paint on the wrought iron exterior and curling between the chairs and tables inside is delightfully chipped.
In my willing naiveté, I assumed that Bauhaus had been in Seattle since the ‘60’s, that the counterculture revolutionaries that haunted Capitol Hill during this time wrote their manifestos here on the cramped tables and on the bright blue and red chairs on the front sidewalk. That’s just what they want you to think. Like a lot of Seattle, especially Capitol Hill, Bauhaus is just a nostalgic reproduction from the early 1900’s, of the German, Walter Gropius-founded movement, Bauhaus.
Bauhaus was an art movement that lasted from 1919 to 1933 that combined fine arts with architecture, particularly the earlier movements of modernism. The movement focused on the practicality and functionality of simple design, using clean lines and form-focused strtuctures, but an artist could still be an artist even if he mass-produced his work.
It’s kind of fascinating how much Seattle focuses on creating reproductions and the willingness of its residents to pretend that they are the real thing. Take Linda’s and Smith (a Capitol Hill bar and restaurant, respectively). These two establishments make their whole business trying to look like old-fashioned ski lodges or rustic country taverns—with deer heads mounted on the wall, faded photographs of flora and fauna propped on old trunks, poorly painted portraits of somebody’s long dead grandfather hanging from the rafters—even though patrons know full well that they’ve just stepped in from the puddle-filled street in the present day.
Not that this is a Seattle-only phenomenon. Throughout all of the country, there are mock European village squares that serve as outdoor shopping malls, Japanese restaurants that use fake pagodas and murals of Mt. Fuji, re-printed vintage dresses that you can buy at H&M. What makes something “authentic” in this day in age is almost un-definable—and it’s almost impossible to parse out what makes something “authentic” versus "inauthentic." But that’s a topic for another post.
Bauhaus knows that it’s inauthentic, but it wants to pretend that it is real to sell its coffee and pastries. They must be doing something right. Patrons flock to the shop like none other I’ve seen in Seattle. The line is nearly out the door by 6:45 in the morning, and by nightfall, all the tables and chairs are full with people typing on laptops or scribbling in notebooks. It attracts mostly the post-grunge types, the hipsters in their mountain hiking boots, humanities students in short dresses and knit caps—the kind of authentic/inauthentic people found all over in Capitol Hill.
I don’t know why it works, other than to say they’ve really fooled everyone that patronizes it. But then again, everyone wants to be fooled. And now that the inauthenticity in Bauhaus is old enough (1993 is almost 20 years ago), it doesn’t feel like that new old—like Las Vegas’ Venice gondola rides that feel plasticky and fake—probably because it’s not new anymore. There is real grime on the walls, and the book pages in the books have really turned yellow.
Bauhaus makes me ask, once again, is everything that is modern old—but still new—again?
Sources and further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
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