Bios, Lobsters, Penguins: Moholy-Nagy’s Vitalist Thinking from Francé to London Zoo

Abstract

In this essay I will examine how László Moholy-Nagy’s relationship to biology evolved and how the beginnings of ecological design underlying the Bauhaus’s modernity project were outlined in two movies shot during his London years. Two documentaries, the Lobsters and The New Architecture and the London Zoo directly address the relation between animals and humans. The narrative of the documentaries, their camera work and the contemporary reception of them reveals a lot about the reconfiguration of Bauhaus ideology as a blueprint of ecological design during the emigration to the United States. We can trace Moholy-Nagy’s approach to “design according to the laws of nature” back to the impact of Raoul Francé’s concepts of Biotechnik, the notion of Bios and his monist beliefs, which were already present in his worldview during the Weimar years of the 1920s. The difference between the English edition of his design method and pedagogy book New Vision (1938) and the original Von Material zu Architektur (1929) clearly demonstrates the shift towards biological functionalism. Aiming to establish harmony between human life and the biological forces of nature and he asserted that a well-functioning biotic community is the precondition for a well-functioning human society. Even if he only indirectly argued for ecological protection in that early stage of ecological awareness, Moholy-Nagy wrote his name in the history of ecological design.