What is the Bauhaus? The school that shaped modern design

The Bauhaus was a school of art, design and architecture in Germany that existed from 1919 to 1933, first in Weimar, then in Dessau and finally in Berlin. It was founded by the architect Walter Gropius and set out to unite art, craft and industry. Its simple, functional objects, tubular steel furniture and typography have influenced design to this day.

Facts

A new school after the war

In 1919, after the First World War, the art academy and the school of arts and crafts in Weimar were merged into the Staatliches Bauhaus under the leadership of the architect Walter Gropius. In his manifesto he wrote that artists and craftsmen should work together and that all the arts should be united in building. The name alludes to the medieval masons' lodges, the Bauhütten.

Teaching began with a preliminary course in which students could explore material, form and colour freely, first under Johannes Itten and later under László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. They then worked in workshops for metal, weaving, furniture, ceramics, typography and mural painting, each led by both an artist and a master craftsman.

The artists

The Bauhaus had some of the foremost artists of the time as teachers. Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught form and colour, and their theories about how colours and forms act on the viewer became part of the education. Read more in the guide to abstract art.

Gunta Stölzl became the school's first female master and led the weaving workshop, which became one of the most commercially successful workshops, with weavings such as her wall hangings. The Bauhaus accepted many women students, but they were often steered towards weaving.

Dessau and the objects

In 1925 the school moved to Dessau, where Gropius designed the famous Bauhaus Building with a glass façade in front of the workshops. Now the emphasis was on design for industry. Marcel Breuer, who had studied at the school, made the Wassily chair of bent tubular steel, inspired by bicycle handlebars.

Marianne Brandt designed the MT 49 teapot in 1924 from circles, hemispheres and cylinders. Josef Hartwig made a chess set in which the shape of each piece shows how it may move, and the Bauhaus wallpapers of 1929 became the school's greatest commercial success. The typographer Herbert Bayer designed an alphabet without capitals.

The end and the spread

The Bauhaus was politically exposed from the start. Under pressure from the Nazis the school moved to Berlin in 1932 under Mies van der Rohe, and in 1933 it closed. Many teachers and students emigrated. Gropius and Breuer taught at Harvard, Mies in Chicago, Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 and Albers taught at Black Mountain College.

After the war the ideas were carried on in West Germany at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, which the former Bauhaus student Max Bill helped to found and from which Braun recruited its designers. Read more under Ulm and Braun and in the guide to Dieter Rams.

What is Bauhaus design?

The word Bauhaus is often used today for anything that is simple, geometric and undecorated, but the school embraced many tendencies, from Expressionism at the beginning to industrial design towards the end. What they shared was the idea that form should come from function, material and manufacturing method, and that good design should be accessible to many.

A typical Bauhaus object is built from simple geometric basic forms, circle, square and triangle, in materials such as steel, glass and wood, often with primary colours or black and white. Read more under the movement Bauhaus and in the guide to Functionalism in architecture.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who founded the Bauhaus in 1919?