What Was the Bauhaus? The School That Designed the Modern World
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A tubular steel chair, a sans-serif typeface, a glass-walled office block, a flat-roofed white house, a lamp with a globe of opal glass: the objects that mean modern in the twentieth century were designed by the teachers and students of one school, which opened in Weimar in 1919, moved twice, and was closed by the Nazis in 1933 after fourteen years and about 1,250 students. The Bauhaus, house of building, set out to unite art and craft in the service of a new society, and it was shut down as degenerate and Bolshevik by a regime that recognised its ambitions; its refugees then taught the rest of the world what it had begun.
The idea
Walter Gropius, an architect who had fought in the war, founded the school in 1919 by merging Weimar's academy of fine art with its school of arts and crafts, and his manifesto called on artists to return to the crafts, to end the distinction between the artist and the craftsman, and to build, together, the cathedral of the future, which the woodcut on its cover showed as a Gothic spire. The Arts and Crafts movement and the Werkbund had wanted the same union, and the Bauhaus's contribution was to add the machine: after about 1923 its slogan became art and technology, a new unity, and the workshops turned from handmade objects to prototypes for industry, designed so that they could be mass-produced well and cheaply for people who had never owned a good chair.
The teaching
Every student began with a preliminary course, invented by Johannes Itten and taken over by Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, which stripped away what they had been taught and set them to work with materials, colour, form and light from first principles, folding paper, studying textures and drawing the same object a hundred ways. They then entered a workshop, each run by a master of form, an artist, and a master of craft:
- •The metal workshop, under Moholy-Nagy, where Marianne Brandt made the teapots and lamps that are still in production and Wilhelm Wagenfeld the table lamp
- •The furniture workshop, where Marcel Breuer, inspired by his bicycle's handlebars, bent tubular steel into a pioneering club chair in 1925 and soon into cantilevered chairs
- •The weaving workshop, under Gunta Stolzl, the only workshop led by a woman, where Anni Albers and others made the textiles that were the school's most commercially successful product
- •Typography and printing, where Herbert Bayer designed a lower-case sans-serif alphabet and the posters and the school's own books
- •The painting classes of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, whose theory of colour and form ran through everything
- •Architecture, which despite the name had no department until 1927
Three cities
The school left Weimar in 1925 when a conservative state government cut its funding, and moved to Dessau, an industrial town whose mayor wanted it, where Gropius designed the building that is its icon, a glass-walled workshop wing, a bridge of offices and a block of student rooms, and the masters' houses in the woods nearby. Gropius resigned in 1928 and was succeeded by Hannes Meyer, a Marxist who pushed the school toward social housing and cheap goods and was sacked in 1930 for his politics; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who followed, made it an architecture school and stripped out the politics, which did not save it. The Nazis won Dessau's council in 1931 and closed the school in 1932, Mies reopened it in a Berlin factory as a private institute, and the Gestapo raided it in April 1933; the masters voted to dissolve it that July.
The diaspora
Closing the school spread it. Gropius went to Harvard and Breuer with him, Mies to Chicago, where he built the glass towers of the Lake Shore Drive and the Seagram Building in New York; Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Josef and Anni Albers taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then Yale, and Bayer designed for American corporations. The white flat-roofed houses of Tel Aviv, four thousand of them, were built by Bauhaus-trained emigres in the 1930s and are a World Heritage site; the International Style, named at a New York exhibition in 1932, was the Bauhaus's architecture generalised across the world; and the design courses of every art school since, with their foundation year and their workshops, are its curriculum. The tubular chair, the sans-serif and the glass box are now so ordinary that they are invisible, which was the point.
The criticism
The school promised good design for everyone and produced, in its lifetime, objects that only the well-off could buy, and the mass housing that its ideas inspired after 1945, the towers and slabs of the post-war city, became the example of modern architecture's failure to understand how people live. Its women were steered into weaving whatever they had wanted to do, and the reputation of its men rests partly on their work. And the machine aesthetic that was meant to be honest became, in the corporate towers of the 1960s, the style of the powerful. The Bauhaus's defenders reply that it lasted fourteen years, was shut by fascists, and set the terms of a century of argument about what design is for, which it did.
Kandinsky's questionnaire and the building blocks
In 1923 Wassily Kandinsky handed out a questionnaire at the Bauhaus asking people to fill a triangle, a square and a circle with the colour each seemed to call for. He hoped to find universal laws of visual language, and the answers he favoured were a yellow triangle, a red square and a blue circle. That trio became a kind of emblem of the school. Not everyone at the time agreed with the answers, and later attempts to repeat the survey have not produced such a neat result, but the exercise shows the Bauhaus habit of treating form and colour as things you could test.
The same thinking reached the nursery. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, who worked in the Bauhaus wood workshop, designed a set of painted wooden building blocks for children in 1923, made of simple geometric pieces in primary colours that could become a boat, a house or anything else. The idea was that children should build with open shapes rather than copy fixed models. A version of the set is still manufactured today. If you have ever played with plain geometric blocks in bright primary colours, you have handled something close to a Bauhaus teaching aid.
There was no single Bauhaus style
The clean white image of the Bauhaus belongs mostly to its Dessau years, and the early school in Weimar looked quite different. Its first objects were often handmade and expressionist, and one of its earliest building projects, a timber house in Berlin designed by Gropius and Adolf Meyer in 1920 and 1921, was decorated with carved wood. Johannes Itten, who ran the preliminary course, followed a religious movement called Mazdaznan, began classes with breathing and movement exercises, and promoted a vegetarian diet heavy in garlic. His influence troubled Gropius as the school turned towards industry, and Itten left in 1923.
Gropius himself rejected the idea of a Bauhaus style. Writing in the 1930s, he said that a fixed style would have been a confession of failure, since the aim was a method of working from materials, function and production rather than a look to be copied. The teachers disagreed openly with one another, and the paintings of Klee and Kandinsky sat beside lamps and furniture designed for factories. The label Bauhaus style was largely the creation of later critics, exhibitions and marketing, which is why buildings described that way today are often simply modernist ones that no Bauhaus member had anything to do with.
The building that became a manifesto
When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Walter Gropius designed a new home for the school that put its ideas into concrete, steel and glass. Completed in 1926, the building separated its functions into connected wings, workshops, classrooms and a block of studios where students lived, each shaped by its use rather than by any traditional style.
Its most striking feature was the workshop wing's curtain wall, a continuous sheet of glass hung in front of the structure, so that from outside the activity inside was on display. The building was badly damaged in the Second World War and later restored, and in 1996 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list together with other Bauhaus sites.
The takeaway
The Bauhaus was the German school of art, craft and design founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932, and closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, which taught a foundation course in materials and form followed by workshops in metal, furniture, weaving, typography and later architecture, aiming to design good objects for machine production and a new society. Its teachers and students, scattered by its closure, gave the world the tubular steel chair, the sans-serif type, the glass-walled building and the modern design school.