I think there is a chance you forgot to perceive the Bauhaus within it's historical context. The Bauhaus kitchen I mentioned absolutly was an improvement in terms of both raw usability and technological quality compared to the typical German kitchen that was common back in that day.
Some of that was of course achieved on the back of more modern kitchen devices and electricity, but most of it was just thinking about where to put things, how they are interacted with in daily use and giving it an aesthetically pleasing form. The stated goal of e.g. that kitchen was to give the modern housewife more time by reducing unnecessary movements by clever design.
This is why I don't really get the tube amp example. Tube amps (as nearly all other electrical devices have been buily more rugged and over engineered back in the day. The dynamic that lead to the degraded build quality has been mostly societal and systemic (customers not as willing/able to pay money for quality, mamifacturers being more interested in increasing shareholder value by replacing a high quality potentiometer with a cheap membrane button while calling it progress). This is not progress it is the 20th century equivalent of a babylonian merchant selling low quality grain in 1750 BC [0] or in other words: somebody tries to get rich by selling low quality stuff. The design follows the market here — most designers I know would die for a company that finally let's them design good stuff.
Bauhaus designs were certainly not low quality stuff however. A Bauhaus stool certainly had different design parameters than e.g. a Jugendstil one, some of which also made it cheaper to manufacture, but cheaping out was not the goal here. It was to make design more accessible and more usable.
A bass player today can make the legit choice that they want to get the best sound at the needed volume for the lightest possible weight. A quality tube bass amp weighs upwards 20 kg — without a speaker cabinet. Getting yourself a good class D amp is not a bad choice in today's time and age. Of course you could also compare a top of line tube amp to a cheap knockoff class D amp operated with an even cheaper switch mode PSU, but that would be like going from 200€ cheap laptop to an M1 macbook pro and declaring all non-apple laptops shit. There are really really good class D amps out there both in terms of sound and function.
That's definitely true, in it's historical context things are a lot different, what I'd consider good mass production design might not have even been possible back then.
The "Truth to materials" idea makes a lot more sense considering that cheap faux veneers and the like used to just straight up fall apart, and the "No extra ornamentation" idea makes sense when you don't have a CNC machine.
Still, it is odd that the modern minimalist movement is so similar even though the economics and engineering has changed. It seems much more philosophical than pragmatic in it's current iteration .
The best of modern design makes "Cheap trash" into a feature rather than a bug.
A cheap membrane button might wear out, and a Bauhaus engineer will think "What's wrong with a good old volume knob? I'll pay $3 for a pot that isn't scratchy".
In a more reasonable modern design you'd have something like a rotary encoder or a capacitive touchscreen, and DSP volume control , in the same chip that was also handling your real-time speaker correction and modeling, WiFi control, etc.
Obviously, there's going to be an all analog tube amp that sounds as good or better than your $2 speaker and mini supercomputer driving it to pretend it's not crappy.
But you probably won't hear the difference unless you're an elite player in a great room, so it's only relevant to the top enthusiasts.
Bauhaus encourages people to fix problems by simplifying, modern design says "I bet I can make a capacitive encoder only a little more expensive than a good pot if I make ten million of them and use some more DSP to fix the shitty signal, and in the process I'll get these 8 new features for free"
Some of that was of course achieved on the back of more modern kitchen devices and electricity, but most of it was just thinking about where to put things, how they are interacted with in daily use and giving it an aesthetically pleasing form. The stated goal of e.g. that kitchen was to give the modern housewife more time by reducing unnecessary movements by clever design.
This is why I don't really get the tube amp example. Tube amps (as nearly all other electrical devices have been buily more rugged and over engineered back in the day. The dynamic that lead to the degraded build quality has been mostly societal and systemic (customers not as willing/able to pay money for quality, mamifacturers being more interested in increasing shareholder value by replacing a high quality potentiometer with a cheap membrane button while calling it progress). This is not progress it is the 20th century equivalent of a babylonian merchant selling low quality grain in 1750 BC [0] or in other words: somebody tries to get rich by selling low quality stuff. The design follows the market here — most designers I know would die for a company that finally let's them design good stuff.
Bauhaus designs were certainly not low quality stuff however. A Bauhaus stool certainly had different design parameters than e.g. a Jugendstil one, some of which also made it cheaper to manufacture, but cheaping out was not the goal here. It was to make design more accessible and more usable.
A bass player today can make the legit choice that they want to get the best sound at the needed volume for the lightest possible weight. A quality tube bass amp weighs upwards 20 kg — without a speaker cabinet. Getting yourself a good class D amp is not a bad choice in today's time and age. Of course you could also compare a top of line tube amp to a cheap knockoff class D amp operated with an even cheaper switch mode PSU, but that would be like going from 200€ cheap laptop to an M1 macbook pro and declaring all non-apple laptops shit. There are really really good class D amps out there both in terms of sound and function.
[0] See complaint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir