Bauhaus

German school of art, design, and architecture founded in 1919 in Weimar by the architect Walter Gropius, who aimed to fuse art, design, architecture, and crafts into a unified whole. By 1923, as Germany's economy deteriorated, handcrafts were dropped in favour of a more functionalist approach, combining craft design with industrial production. The adoption of industrial technology had previously been criticized by other craft and design movements. In 1925, under political and financial pressure, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, where it was housed in a building designed by Gropius, and formalized a new statement of beliefs: ‘Art and Technology, a new unity’. In 1932 it made another forced move to Berlin, where it was closed by the Nazis the following year. In spite of its short life and troubled existence, the Bauhaus is regarded as the most important art school of the 20th century, and it exercised a huge influence on the world of design: its art education system was adopted by the rest of the art world. The teachers at the school included some of the outstanding artists of the time, among them the painters Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky and the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Some of the most revolutionary, and now familiar, designs of the 20th century came out of the Bauhaus, including buildings constructed from steel and glass, and tubular steel furniture. Features of Bauhaus-style architecture, also known as the International style, include glass curtain walls, cubic blocks, and unsupported corners.

Those who worked at the school shared three clear ideals with Gropius: to stop each of the forms of art from being isolated from each other; to raise the status of crafts to the same level as that of fine arts; and to maintain contact with the leaders of industry and craft, in order to achieve independence from government control by selling designs directly to the manufacturer.

Teaching at the Bauhaus was radically different from existing art-school training, stressing the links between architecture and such crafts as stained glass, mural decoration, metalwork, carpentry, weaving, pottery, typography, and graphics, and fostering an understanding of materials. All students had to take a preliminary course in which they studied basic principles of form and colour. The idea was to end the 19th-century split between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Students at the new school were trained by both an artist and a craftsperson, realizing the desire of Gropius to make modern artists familiar with science and economics. In this way creative imagination was united with practical knowledge of crafts, allowing the development of a new sense of functional design. The ideas of the school were subsequently incorporated into teaching programmes in Europe and the USA, where many of its teachers and students emigrated. Gropius himself emigrated to the USA in 1937, and other influential Bauhaus teachers who moved there included Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau was restored in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary of its opening there, and after the reunification of Germany in 1990 it once again became a design institution. Its sleek, modern, functional appearance, and glass and steel construction, typifies the Bauhaus style.