Chapter 2 of 24
Institute Of Design, Chicago. 2 Pages From L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, February 1950
Then the new Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy in Chicago came into trouble in 1946. Moholy was dying of leukaemia. He knew he was dying, so not much more than three weeks before his death, he came down to visit all his immigrant colleagues in New York for farewells and so on. And he had, in the meantime, given me an awful lot of help at one of his summer sessions, because I really didn't have any technology except the Bauhaus foundation courses, which I took with Moholy. Then the committee of Gropius, Hodnett and other people, Sert, recommended me to Walter Paepcke, a millionaire who had been supporting the Institute of Desire. He immediately asked me to come and see him. His first question was, of course I know all about your profession, but tell me, what are your politics? And I said, I'm a socialist. He said, I don't understand that word. So I got again this freewheeling kind of possibility to experiment, do anything.