Persepolis and the Bauhaus

Stand at the foot of the great stairway at Persepolis and the first thing you notice is not grandeur but rhythm. The steps are shallow, low enough that a person in long robes could climb them without breaking stride. Along the stone faces beside them, figures walk in single file: delegations from across an empire, each carrying something, each one a small variation on the one before. It is a procession that never arrives. It is also, if you squint, a very modern idea of how to organise a surface.

Persepolis, known in Persian as Takht-e Jamshid, the Throne of Jamshid, after a king of legend, was begun under Darius I in the late sixth century BCE and built out by his successors as a ceremonial centre of the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander’s army burned it in 330 BCE. What survives is a terrace of columns, doorways and reliefs that has been photographed so often it risks becoming wallpaper. We want to look at it again, and to look at it next to something that seems to have no business sharing a page with it: the Bauhaus, the school of art, craft and design founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919.

The comparison is not a claim of influence. Nobody at the Bauhaus was copying Achaemenid capitals, and the builders of Persepolis were not anticipating tubular steel. It is a claim of rhyme. Two very different societies, two and a half thousand years apart, arrived at a shared conviction: that form is a kind of argument, and that a well-made thing can hold a whole worldview in its proportions.

The grid and the column

Persepolis is a city of repetition. Its halls were forests of columns set out on regular grids; the largest of them is still called the Hall of a Hundred Columns. The shafts were fluted, their capitals crowned with paired animal foreparts, most famously bulls, set back to back to carry the roof beams. A single column is ornate. A hundred columns become something else: a field, a measure, a modular system in which the individual unit matters less than the order it produces.

The Bauhaus loved the same paradox. Its teachers and students worked obsessively with elementary forms, the square, the circle, the triangle, and with standardised parts that could be combined and recombined. The ambition was not ornament but clarity: to find the few shapes from which many things could be made. Look at a Bauhaus textile or a page of its typography and you see the same thing the Persepolis reliefs show you. A unit, repeated, becomes a field. A field, ordered, becomes an idea.

The processional reliefs are where the rhyme is strongest. Figures stand in registers, divided by bands of rosettes. Each delegation is distinguished by dress and by the gifts it carries, yet the whole is held in a strict cadence. It is variation inside a grid: the same logic as a typeface, where every letter is different and every letter belongs.

The workshop and the total work

The deeper kinship is about labour. Darius’s inscriptions at his palace at Susa describe a building assembled from the materials and skills of many lands: timber from one province, gold from another, craftsmen from across the empire. Administrative tablets found at Persepolis itself record rations paid to workers, many of them from far-flung regions. Whatever else it was, Persepolis was a collective work, a building that made an empire visible by gathering its hands in one place.

The Bauhaus began with a similar wager. Gropius’s founding manifesto called on architects, painters and sculptors to return to the crafts and to work together on the building as a shared project, dissolving the old snobbery that ranked the fine artist above the artisan. Its workshops for metal, weaving, wood, ceramics and print were meant to train people who could think with their hands. The German word that hovers over all this is Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art: a single creation in which architecture, image, object and use are conceived together.

Persepolis is a total work in exactly that sense. Its stone, its carved figures, its columns and its ceremonial routes were not separate arts awkwardly assembled. They were one statement about order, hospitality and power, written in several materials at once. You do not look at a relief at Persepolis the way you look at a painting in a frame. You walk past it, up a staircase, towards a hall. The art is choreography.

Why the rhyme matters now

There is an easy way to talk about Iranian heritage, and it is mostly adjectives: opulent, ancient, mysterious. Those words do a quiet kind of damage. They turn a living design intelligence into a mood board, something to borrow rather than something to think with. Placing Persepolis beside the Bauhaus is our small refusal of that habit. It says that the people who laid out those terraces were solving problems of system, module and collective labour that modern designers would recognise immediately.

It also says something about modernism. The Bauhaus is often told as a story of rupture, a clean break from history. But the hunger for elemental form, for the dignity of the made object and for art that organises life rather than decorating it, is very old. Modernism did not invent order. It rediscovered, in its own vocabulary, a conviction that older builders held without needing a manifesto.

That is the spirit in which Persiahaus takes its name. We are not interested in ancient Persia as costume, nor in modernism as a style of chair. We are interested in the place where they meet: the grid that can hold a procession, the workshop that can hold an empire’s worth of hands, the conviction that making something well is a way of saying what you believe. A homeland, seen this way, is less a place you mourn than a set of forms you can still use.

Our house print Procession starts there. Stepped crenellations, the silhouette that crowns so many Achaemenid walls; fluted columns reduced to stripes; a line of figures pared down to circles and rectangles, walking, as they have for two and a half millennia, towards a hall they never quite reach.