About the Bauhaus

Bauhaus is the com­mon term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and archi­tec­ture school in Ger­many that oper­ated from 1919 to 1933, and for its approach to design that it pub­li­cized and taught. The most nat­ural mean­ing for its name (related to the Ger­man verb for “build”) is Archi­tec­ture House. Bauhaus style became one of the most influ­en­tial cur­rents in Mod­ernist archi­tec­ture, and one of the most impor­tant cur­rents of the New Objectivity.

The Bauhaus art school had a pro­found influ­ence upon sub­se­quent devel­op­ments in art, archi­tec­ture, graphic design, inte­rior design, indus­trial design and typography.

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The Bauhaus art school existed in three Ger­man cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three dif­fer­ent architect-directors (Wal­ter Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933). The changes of venue and lead­er­ship resulted in a con­stant shift­ing of focus, tech­nique, instruc­tors, and pol­i­tics. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for instance, although it had been an impor­tant rev­enue source, the pot­tery shop was dis­con­tin­ued. When Mies took over the school in 1930, he trans­formed it into a pri­vate school, and would not allow any sup­port­ers of Hannes Meyer to attend it.

Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy revived the school for a sin­gle year in Chicago as the New Bauhaus.

Polit­i­cal context

The foun­da­tion of the Bauhaus occurred at a time of cri­sis and tur­moil in Europe as a whole and par­tic­u­larly in Ger­many. Its estab­lish­ment resulted from a con­flu­ence of a diverse set of polit­i­cal, social, edu­ca­tional and artis­tic devel­op­ment in the first two decades of the twen­ti­eth century.

The con­ser­v­a­tive mod­erni­sa­tion of the Ger­man Empire dur­ing the 1870s had main­tained power in the hands of the aris­toc­racy. It also neces­si­tated mil­i­tarism and impe­ri­al­ism to main­tain sta­bil­ity and eco­nomic growth. By 1912 the rise of the left­ist SPD had gal­va­nized polit­i­cal posi­tions with notions of inter­na­tional sol­i­dar­ity and social­ism set against impe­ri­al­ist nation­al­ism. World War I ensued from 1914 – 18.

In 1917 in the midst of the car­nage of the First World War, work­ers and sol­dier Sovi­ets seized power in Rus­sia. Inspired by the Russ­ian work­ers and sol­dier Sovi­ets, sim­i­lar Ger­man com­mu­nist fac­tions — most notably The Spartacist League — were formed, who sought a sim­i­lar rev­o­lu­tion for Ger­many. The fol­low­ing year, the death throes of the war pro­voked the Ger­man Rev­o­lu­tion, with the SPD secur­ing the abdi­ca­tion of the Kaiser and the for­ma­tion of a rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment. On 1 Jan­u­ary 1919, the Spartacist League attempted to take con­trol of Berlin, an action that was bru­tally sup­pressed by the com­bined forces of the SPD, the rem­nants of the Ger­man Army, and right-wing para­mil­i­tary groups.

Elec­tions were held on the Jan­u­ary 19, and the Weimar Repub­lic was estab­lished. Com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion was still a tan­gi­ble prospect for many; indeed, a Soviet repub­lic was declared in Munich, before its sup­pres­sion by the right wing Freiko­rps and reg­u­lar army. Spo­radic fight­ing con­tin­ued to flare up around the country.

Bauhaus and Ger­man modernism

The design inno­va­tions com­monly asso­ci­ated with Gropius and the Bauhaus — the rad­i­cally sim­pli­fied forms, the ratio­nal­ity and func­tion­al­ity, and the idea that mass-production was rec­on­cil­able with the indi­vid­ual artis­tic spirit — were already partly devel­oped in Ger­many before the Bauhaus was founded.

The Ger­man national design­ers’ orga­ni­za­tion Deutscher Werk­bund was formed in 1907 by Her­mann Muthe­sius to har­ness the new poten­tials of mass pro­duc­tion, with a mind towards pre­serv­ing Germany’s eco­nomic com­pet­i­tive­ness with Eng­land. In its first seven years, the Werk­bund came to be regarded as the author­i­ta­tive body on ques­tions of design in Ger­many, and was copied in other coun­tries. Many fun­da­men­tal ques­tions of crafts­man­ship vs. mass pro­duc­tion, the rela­tion­ship of use­ful­ness and beauty, the prac­ti­cal pur­pose of for­mal beauty in a com­mon­place object, and whether or not a sin­gle proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1870 mem­bers (by 1914).

Begin­ning in June 1907, Peter Behrens’ pio­neer­ing indus­trial design work for the Ger­man elec­tri­cal com­pany AEG suc­cess­fully inte­grated art and mass pro­duc­tion on a large scale. He designed con­sumer prod­ucts, stan­dard­ized parts, cre­ated clean-lined designs for the company’s graph­ics, devel­oped a con­sis­tent cor­po­rate iden­tity, built the mod­ernist land­mark AEG Tur­bine Fac­tory, and made full use of newly devel­oped mate­ri­als such as poured con­crete and exposed steel. Behrens was a found­ing mem­ber of the Werk­bund, and both Wal­ter Gropius and Adolf Meier worked for him in this period.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919, the same year as the Weimar Con­sti­tu­tion, and at a time when the Ger­man Zeit­geist turned from emo­tional Expres­sion­ism to the matter-of-fact New Objec­tiv­ity. An entire group of work­ing archi­tects, includ­ing Erich Mendel­sohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, turned away from fan­ci­ful exper­i­men­ta­tion, and turned toward ratio­nal, func­tional, some­times stan­dard­ized building.

Beyond the Bauhaus, many other sig­nif­i­cant German-speaking archi­tects in the 1920s responded to the same aes­thetic issues and mate­r­ial pos­si­bil­i­ties as the school. They also responded to the promise of a ‘min­i­mal dwelling’ writ­ten into the Con­sti­tu­tion. Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Mar­tin Wag­ner, among oth­ers, built large hous­ing blocks in Frank­furt and Berlin. The accep­tance of mod­ernist design into every­day life was the sub­ject of pub­lic­ity cam­paigns, well-attended pub­lic exhi­bi­tions like the Weis­senhof Estate, films, and some­times fierce pub­lic debate.

The entire move­ment of Ger­man archi­tec­tural mod­ernism was known as Neues Bauen.

His­tory of the Bauhaus

Weimar

The school was founded by Wal­ter Gropius at the con­ser­v­a­tive city of Weimer in 1919 as a merger of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Acad­emy of Fine Arts. His open­ing man­i­festo pro­claimed “to cre­ate a new guild of crafts­men, with­out the class dis­tinc­tions which raise an arro­gant bar­rier between crafts­man and artist”.

Most of the con­tents of the pre-war Weimar work­shops had been sold dur­ing World War I. The early inten­tion was for the Bauhaus to be a com­bined archi­tec­ture school, crafts school, and acad­emy of the arts. Much inter­nal and exter­nal con­flict followed.

Gropius argued that a new period of his­tory had begun with the end of the war. He wanted to cre­ate a new archi­tec­tural style to reflect this new era. His style in archi­tec­ture and con­sumer goods was to be func­tional, cheap and con­sis­tent with mass pro­duc­tion. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end func­tional prod­ucts with artis­tic pre­ten­sions. The Bauhaus issued a mag­a­zine called “Bauhaus” and a series of books called “Bauhaus­bücher”. Since the coun­try lacked the quan­tity of raw mate­ri­als that the United States and Great Britain had, they had to rely on the pro­fi­ciency of its skilled labor force and abil­ity to export inno­v­a­tive and high qual­ity goods. There­fore design­ers were needed and so was a new type of art edu­ca­tion. The school’s phi­los­o­phy basi­cally stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.

Thuringian Par­lia­men­tary sup­port for the school came from the Social Demo­c­ra­tic party. In Feb­ru­ary 1924, the Social Democ­rats lost con­trol of the state par­lia­ment to the nation­al­ists. the Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion place the staff on six-month con­tracts and cut the school’s fund­ing in half. they had already been look­ing for alter­na­tive sources of fund­ing. Together with the Coun­cil of Mas­ters he announced the clo­sure of the Bauhaus from the end of March 1925.

After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of indus­trial design with teach­ers and staff less antag­o­nis­tic to the con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal régime remained in Weimar. This school was even­tu­ally known as the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity of Archi­tec­ture and Civil Engi­neer­ing, and in 1996 changed its name to Bauhaus Uni­ver­sity Weimar.

Dessau

The Dessau years saw a remark­able change in direc­tion for the school. Accord­ing to Elaine Hoff­man, Gropius had approached the Dutch archi­tect Mart Stam to run the newly-founded archi­tec­ture pro­gram, and when Stam declined the posi­tion, Gropius turned to Stam’s friend and col­league in the ABC group, Hannes Meyer. Gropius would come to regret this decision.

The charis­matic Meyer rose to direc­tor when Gropius resigned in Feb­ru­ary 1928, and Meyer brought the Bauhaus its two most sig­nif­i­cant build­ing com­mis­sions, both of which still exist: five apart­ment build­ings in the city of Dessau, and the head­quar­ters of the Fed­eral School of the Ger­man Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau. Meyer favored mea­sure­ments and cal­cu­la­tions in his pre­sen­ta­tions to clients, along with the use of off-the-shelf archi­tec­tural com­po­nents to reduce costs, and this approach proved attrac­tive to poten­tial clients. The school turned its first profit under his lead­er­ship in 1929.

But Meyer also gen­er­ated a great deal of con­flict. As a rad­i­cal func­tion­al­ist, he had no patience with the aes­thetic pro­gram, and forced the res­ig­na­tions of Her­bert Bayer, Mar­cel Breuer, and other long­time instruc­tors. As a vocal Com­mu­nist, he encour­aged the for­ma­tion of a Com­mu­nist stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion. In the increas­ingly dan­ger­ous polit­i­cal atmos­phere, this became a threat to the exis­tence of the Dessau school, and to the per­sonal safety of any­one involved. Meyer was also com­pro­mised by a sex­ual scan­dal involv­ing one of his stu­dents, and Gropius fired him in 1930.

Berlin

Although nei­ther the Nazi Party nor Hitler him­self had a cohe­sive archi­tec­tural ‘pol­icy’ in the 1930s, Nazi writ­ers like Wil­helm Frick and Alfred Rosen­berg had labelled the Bauhaus “un-German” and crit­i­cized its mod­ernist styles, delib­er­ately gen­er­at­ing pub­lic con­tro­versy over issues like flat roofs. Increas­ingly through the early 1930s, they char­ac­ter­ized the Bauhaus as a front for Com­mu­nists, Russ­ian, and social lib­er­als. Indeed, sec­ond direc­tor Hannes Meyer was an avowed Com­mu­nist, and he and a num­ber of loyal stu­dents moved to the Soviet Union in 1930.

Under polit­i­cal pres­sure the Bauhaus was closed on the orders of the Nazi régime on April 11 1933. The clo­sure, and the response of Mies van der Rohe, is fully doc­u­mented in Elaine Hochman’s Archi­tects of Fortune.

Archi­tec­tural Output

The para­dox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its man­i­festo pro­claimed that the ulti­mate aim of all cre­ative activ­ity was build­ing, the school wouldn’t offer classes in archi­tec­ture until 1927. The sin­gle most prof­itable tan­gi­ble prod­uct of the Bauhaus was its wall­pa­per. pic needed

Dur­ing the years under Gropius (1919 – 1927), he and his part­ner Adolf Meyer observed no real dis­tinc­tion between the out­put of his archi­tec­tural office and the school. So the built out­put of Bauhaus archi­tec­ture in these years is the out­put of Gropius: the Som­mer­feld house in Berlin, the Otte house in Berlin, the Auer­bach house in Jena, and the com­pe­ti­tion design for the Chicago Tri­bune Tower, which brought the school much atten­tion. The defin­i­tive 1926 Bauhaus build­ing in Dessau is also attrib­uted to Gropius. Apart from con­tri­bu­tions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, stu­dent work archi­tec­tural amounted to unbuilt projects, inte­rior fin­ishes, and craft work like cab­i­nets, chairs and pottery.

In the next two years under the out­spo­ken Swiss Com­mu­nist archi­tect Hannes Meyer, the archi­tec­tural focus shifted away from aes­thet­ics and towards func­tion­al­ity. But there were major com­mis­sions: one by the city of Dessau for five tightly designed “Lauben­ganghäuser” (apart­ment build­ings with bal­cony access), which are still in use today, and another for the head­quar­ters of the Fed­eral School of the Ger­man Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer’s approach was to research users’ needs and sci­en­tif­i­cally develop the design solution.

And then Mies van der Rohe repu­di­ated Meyer’s pol­i­tics, his sup­port­ers, and his archi­tec­tural approach. As opposed to Gropius’ “study of essen­tials”, and Meyer’s research into user require­ments, Mies advo­cated a “spa­tial imple­men­ta­tion of intel­lec­tual deci­sions”, which effec­tively meant an adop­tion of his own aes­thet­ics. Nei­ther Mies nor his Bauhaus stu­dents saw any projects built dur­ing the 1930s.

The pop­u­lar con­cep­tion of the Bauhaus as the source of exten­sive Weimar-era work­ing hous­ing is not accu­rate. Two projects, the apart­ment build­ing project in Dessau and the Törten row hous­ing also in Dessau fall in that cat­e­gory, but devel­op­ing worker hous­ing was not the first pri­or­ity of Gropius nor Mies. It was the Bauhaus con­tem­po­raries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and par­tic­u­larly Ernst May, as the city archi­tects of Berlin, Dres­den and Frank­furt respec­tively, who are right­fully cred­ited with the thou­sands of socially pro­gres­sive hous­ing units built in Weimar Ger­many. In Taut’s case, the hous­ing may still be seen in SW Berlin, is still occu­pied, and can be reached by going eas­ily from the Metro Stop Onkel Tom’s Hutte.

Impact

The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and archi­tec­ture trends in West­ern Europe, the United States and Israel (par­tic­u­larly in White City, Tel Aviv) in the decades fol­low­ing its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled, by the Nazi régime. Tel Aviv, in fact, has been to named by the UN, to the list of world her­itage sites, due to its abun­dance of Bauhaus architecture.

Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in Eng­land dur­ing the mid 1930s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up to them. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Har­vard Grad­u­ate School of Design and worked together before their pro­fes­sional split in 1941. The Har­vard School was enor­mously influ­en­tial in Amer­ica in the late 1940s and early 1950s, pro­duc­ing such stu­dents as Philip John­son, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Hal­prin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the spon­sor­ship of the influ­en­tial Philip John­son, and became one of the pre-eminent archi­tects in the world. Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school under the spon­sor­ship of indus­tri­al­ist and phil­an­thropist Wal­ter Paepcke. Print­maker and painter Werner Drewes was also largely respon­si­ble for bring­ing the Bauhaus aes­thetic to Amer­ica and taught at both Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity in St. Louis. Her­bert Bayer, spon­sored by Paepcke, moved to Aspen, Col­orado in sup­port of Paepcke’s Aspen projects.

One of the main objec­tives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and tech­nol­ogy. The machine was con­sid­ered a pos­i­tive ele­ment, and there­fore indus­trial and prod­uct design were impor­tant com­po­nents. Vorkurs (“ini­tial” or “pre­lim­i­nary course”) was taught; this is the mod­ern day Basic Design course that has become one of the key foun­da­tional courses offered in archi­tec­tural and design schools across the globe. There was no teach­ing of his­tory in the school because every­thing was sup­posed to be designed and cre­ated accord­ing to first prin­ci­ples rather than by fol­low­ing precedent.

One of the most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tions of the Bauhaus is in the field of mod­ern fur­ni­ture design. The world famous and ubiq­ui­tous Can­tilever chair by Dutch designer Mart Stam, using the ten­sile prop­er­ties of steel, and the Wass­ily Chair designed by Mar­cel Breuer are two examples.

The phys­i­cal plant at Dessau sur­vived the War and was oper­ated as a design school with some archi­tec­tural facil­i­ties by the Com­mu­nist Ger­man Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic. This included live stage pro­duc­tions in the Bauhaus the­ater under the name of Bauhaus­bühne (“Bauhaus Stage”). After Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion, a reor­ga­nized school con­tin­ued in the same build­ing, with no essen­tial con­ti­nu­ity with the Bauhaus under Gropius in the early 1920s [1].

In 1999 Bauhaus-Dessau Col­lege started to orga­nize post­grad­u­ate pro­grams with par­tic­i­pants from all over the world. This effort has been sup­ported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foun­da­tion which was founded in 1994 as a pub­lic institution.

Amer­i­can art schools have also redis­cov­ered the Bauhaus school. The Mas­ter Crafts­man Pro­gram at Florida State Uni­ver­sity bases its artis­tic phi­los­o­phy on Bauhaus the­ory and practice.

Many out­stand­ing artists of their time were lec­tur­ers at Bauhaus:

• Anni Albers
• Josef Albers
• Mar­i­anne Brandt
• Mar­cel Breuer
• Avgust ?ernigoj
• Lyonel Feininger
• Naum Gabo
• Lud­wig Hilberseimer
• Johannes Itten
• Wass­ily Kandinsky
• Paul Klee
• Ger­hard Marcks
• Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy
• Piet Mon­drian
• Georg Muche
• Hin­nerk Scheper
• Oskar Schlem­mer
• Joost Schmidt
• Lothar Schreyer
• Naum Slutzky
• Wolf­gang Tumpel
• Gunta Stölzl
• Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe

Ref­er­ences

Arti­cle found in Wikipedia. Images found in Wiki­me­dia Com­mons.

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