Bauhaus

The Bauhaus, officially the Staatliches Bauhaus, was a German art school that operated from 1919 to 1933, blending fine arts with crafts. Its core design philosophy sought to merge an artist’s individual vision with the demands of mass production and a strong focus on functionality. Architect Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar, basing it on the concept of a *Gesamtkunstwerk*—a total work of art where all creative disciplines would eventually unite. Over time, the Bauhaus style became a major force in modern design, modernist architecture, and how architecture is taught.

The school moved through three German cities: Weimar (1919–1925), Dessau (1925–1932), and Berlin (1932–1933). Each location saw a different director: Gropius (1919–1928), Hannes Meyer (1928–1930), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–1933). Under pressure from the Nazi regime, which labeled the school a hub of communist intellectualism, its own leadership shut it down in 1933. Internationally, many former Bauhaus figures found success in the United States, where they became known as pioneers of the International Style. Tel Aviv’s White City, built by Jewish Bauhaus architects who emigrated there, holds the world’s largest concentration of Bauhaus-style architecture.

These shifts in location and leadership caused constant changes in focus, technique, instructors, and politics. For instance, the pottery shop—a significant source of revenue—was closed when the school left Weimar for Dessau. In 1930, Dessau’s mayor, Fritz Hesse, fired Hannes Meyer after a scandal involving alleged misuse of school funds for communist causes, appointing Mies van der Rohe in his place. Van der Rohe then turned the Bauhaus into a private institution and barred supporters of Meyer from the school. The Dessau campus was eventually closed in 1932 after the Nazi party took over the local government of the Free State of Anhalt.

Bauhaus forms and shapes are known for their simplicity: geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, with little to no decoration. Buildings, furniture, and fonts often feature rounded corners, curved walls, or chrome pipes. Some structures have rectangular features such as protruding balconies with flat, chunky railings and long rows of windows. These outlines can be seen as tools for creating an ideal form, which forms the basis of the architectural concept.

After Germany’s defeat in World War I and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit encouraged radical experimentation in the arts, which had been suppressed under the old regime. Many left-leaning Germans were influenced by cultural experiments following the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism, though these influences can be overstated—Gropius described the Bauhaus as entirely apolitical. Just as important was the influence of 19th-century English designer William Morris, who argued that art should serve society’s needs and that form and function should not be separated. This led to the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, marked by a lack of ornamentation and a harmony between an object’s function and its design.

Yet the most significant influence on the Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement with roots in the 1880s that had already appeared in Germany before the war, despite prevailing conservatism. Many design innovations commonly linked to Gropius and the Bauhaus—radically simplified forms, rationality, functionality, and the idea that mass production could coexist with individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the school’s founding. The Deutscher Werkbund, a national designers’ organization, was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness mass production’s potential while preserving Germany’s economic competitiveness with England. Within seven years, the Werkbund became Germany’s authority on design questions and was copied abroad. Its 1,870 members (by 1914) debated fundamental issues: craftsmanship versus mass production, the relationship between usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in everyday objects, and whether a single proper form could exist.

German architectural modernism was called Neues Bauen. Starting in June 1907, Peter Behrens’ pioneering industrial design for the electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, and made full use of new materials like poured concrete and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer worked for him during this period. The Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist had shifted from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity.