Bauhaus History of Design

The Bauhaus was the first model of the contemporary art school. The Bauhaus curriculum combined theoretic education and useful training in the academic workshops. It drew motivation from the suitables of the advanced art movements and style experiments of the early 20th century. A woodcut (revealed right) portrayed the idealized vision of Walter Gropius, a “cathedral” of design. Bauhaus 1919-33 The Bauhaus began with an utopian meaning: “The building of the future” was to integrate all the arts in perfect unity.

In order to reach this goal, the creator, Walter Gropius, saw the need to establish new teaching techniques and was convinced that the base for any art was to be found in handmade: “the school will gradually turn into a workshop”. artists and artisans directed classes and production together at the Bauhaus in Weimar. This was meant to eliminate any difference between arts and applied arts. Naturally, the academic and social claim to a brand-new setup of life and its environment might not constantly be accomplished.

Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus rallied masters and students who sought to reverse the split between art and production by going back to the crafts as the structure of all creative activity and establishing exemplary designs for items and spaces that were to form part of a more human future society. Following extreme internal dispute, in 1923 the Bauhaus turned its ttention to industry under its creator and first director Walter Gropius (1883– 1969).

The major exhibition which opened in 1923, reflecting the revised principle of art and technology as a new unity, showcased the full spectrum of Bauhaus work and prototypes. The Haus Am Horn provided a glimpse of a residential building of the future. In 1924 funding for the Bauhaus was cut so drastically at the instigation of conservative forces that it had to seek a new home. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau at a time of rising economic fortunes, becoming the municipally funded School of Design.

Almost all masters moved with it. Former students became junior masters in charge of the workshops. Famous works of art and architecture and influential designs were produced in Dessau in the years from 1926 to 1932. Walter Gropius resigned as director on 1st April 1928 under the pressure of constant struggles for the Bauhaus survival, He was succeeded by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) whose work sought to shape a harmonious society. Cost-cutting industrial mass production was to make products affordable for the masses.

Despite his successes, Hannes Meyer’s Marxist convictions became a problem for the city council amidst the political turbulence of Germany in 1929, and the following year he was removed from his post. Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) the Bauhaus developed from 1930 into a technical school of architecture with subsidiary art and workshop departments. After the Nazis became the biggest party in Dessau at the elections, the Bauhaus was forced to move in September 1932. It moved to Berlin but only lasted for a short time longer.

The Bauhaus dissolved itself under pressure from the Nazis in 1933. Architecture “The building is the ultimate goal of all fine art,” the Bauhaus manifesto proclaimed back in 1919. Architecture training at the Bauhaus in Weimar was initially the prerogative of Walter Gropius private architectural practice and for a short time courses were run by his partner Adolf Meyer and in association with the “Baugewerkschule” (building trades school) in Weimar. The Bauhaus workshops were involved in these efforts through Gropius’s office.

This collaboration produced the Haus Am Horn in 1923. Some new methods based on specific types and standardisation were employed not only to produce new architecture but to anticipate a new lifestyle through this architecture. In 1927 Walter Gropius offered Hannes Meyer a position in charge of architecture classes. That year Hannes Meyer began to put together a curriculum which included all relevant subjects such as planning, design, draftsmanship, construction, town planning. Architecture for Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer alike mainly denoted the “design of life’s processes”.

Hannes Meyer went far beyond Gropius’s “study of essentials”, which focused too much on the object for his taste, turning his teaching programme into one where the concrete conditions in society and the factors determining architecture and its use formed the starting point for all planning and design. The habits of the future residents of an estate or a house were studied in scientific detail. From 1930 to 1933 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe carried on with much of what had been started under his predecessors.

At the same time Mies van der Rohe streamlined the curriculum to produce something like a system of courses which left almost no room for utopian experiments. The majority of the new student intake at the Bauhaus had already completed a course of studies, and the Bauhaus became a “postgraduate school”. Mies van der Rohe’s teaching focused on the design of specific buildings whose appearance owed nothing to Gropius’s “study of essentials” or to the collective satisfaction of “the people’s needs”, but which were to be “the spatial implementation of intellectual decisions” (Mies van der Rohe) in an aesthetically consummate fashion.