According a recent review in the journal Nature, the leaders of the Bauhaus school of design found inspiration in the life sciences. When Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and others fled Germany for London in the 1930's, they found patrons in some rather unlikely places:

One of these was the ecologist Julian Huxley. As secretary of the Zoological Society of London he had an apartment at the zoo, which he used partly as a showroom for modernist design. Here, scientists, artists, architects, environmentalists and the science-fiction writer H. G. Wells regularly met for discussions about how to save humankind from environmental, economic and social destruction.

Bauhaus design was one of the group's chief passions, and Gropius looked to Huxley and his friends with hope and admiration. Traditional architecture and design reinforced an unfortunate dualism between people and nature, Huxley believed, whereas the Bauhaus approach promised a harmonious reunion. To Huxley, nothing less than the evolutionary survival of the human species was at stake.

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Visitors to the zoo could observe their own primitive desires in animals, [...] so it was of moral importance to place the animals in a model home for healthy living. The gorilla house and the penguin pool, along with a series of other buildings, were therefore built in the Bauhaus style.

But it was also politically important to the group to display thriving animals such as penguins in a highly unnatural setting, to show that humans too could prosper in new environments. "The most unlikely animals seem to thrive under what would seem the most unnatural conditions," zoologist Peter Chalmers Mitchell observed, if they have "freedom from enemies, regular food and general hygiene". The same would hold for workers and the poor, who desperately needed to be liberated from their 'natural' condition of criminal and filthy slums.

Interesting. We've apparently gone full circle, as the current Zeitgeist places a much higher value on authenticity; zoos and natural history museums now aim to show animals in the most natural environments possible. Journalism, television, and Hollywood all now completely dismiss the ideal in favor of what is real (if you consider "reality tv" real).

Since we have a greater desire to see the world as it really is, I wonder if society still has the same expectations from architecture that it once had. I suspect that we no longer expect architects to solve the ills of the world; however, many cities are starting to realize the impact of good architecture on maintaining vibrant urban life.

Rather than indicating a retreat for design's promise to the world, I think this change signals a refinement towards a more realistic offering of how design can address the human condition. This is good—it means rather than promising the world, we're moving in a direction that has the potential to yield demonstrable results.