SHARED VISION: The Second American Bauhaus

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, the book includes 4 page color insert.