Everything about Bauhaus totally explained
"House of Building" or "Building School") is the common term for the, a school in
Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. The Bauhaus school was founded by
Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus didn't have an architecture department for the first several years of its existence. Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in
Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in
art,
architecture,
graphic design,
interior design,
industrial design and
typography. The school existed in three German cities (
Weimar from 1919 to 1925,
Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and
Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors:
Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927,
Hannes Meyer from 1927 to 1930 and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933, when the school was closed by the
Nazi regime. 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 wouldn't allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.
Bauhaus and German modernism
The foundation of Bauhaus occurred at a time of political and cultural upheaval in Germany. Defeat in
World War I, the fall of the
German monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal
Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, previously suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the
Russian Revolution, such as
constructivism. Such influences can be overstated:
Gropius himself didn't share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely unpolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer
William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function.. Thus the Bauhaus style, also known as the
International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.
The most important influence on Bauhaus was however
modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. 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).
The entire movement of German architectural modernism was known as
Neues Bauen. 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 at a time when the German
zeitgeist ("spirit of the times") had 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 new
Weimar 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.
History of the Bauhaus
Weimar
The school was founded by Gropius in Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts school founded by the
Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906 and directed by Belgian
Art Nouveau architect
Henry van de Velde. When van de Velde was forced to resign in 1915 because he was Belgian, he suggested Gropius,
Hermann Obrist and
August Endell as possible successors. In 1919, after delays caused by the destruction of
World War I and a lengthy debate over the ideological and socio-economic reconciliation of
the fine arts and
the applied arts (an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution integrating the two called the Bauhaus. In the pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition entitled "Exhibition of Unknown Architects", Gropius proclaimed his goal as being "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. In 1919 Swiss painter
Johannes Itten, German-American painter
Lyonel Feininger, and German sculptor
Gerhard Marcks, along with Gropius, comprised the faculty of the Bauhaus. By the following year their ranks had grown to include German painter, sculptor and designer
Oskar Schlemmer and Swiss painter
Paul Klee, joined in 1922 by Russian painter
Wassily Kandinsky. A tumultuous year at the Bauhaus, 1922 also saw the move of Dutch painter
Theo van Doesburg to Weimar to promote
De Stijl ("The Style"), and a visit to the Bauhaus by Russian Constructivist artist and architect
El Lissitzky
From 1919 to 1922 the school was shaped by the pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of Johannes Itten, who taught the
Vorkurs or 'preliminary course' that was the introduction to the ideas of the Bauhaus. Itten was heavily influenced in his teaching by the ideas of
Franz Cižek and
Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel an in respect to
aesthetics by the work of the
Blaue Reiter group in
Munich as well as the work of Austrian Expressionist
Oskar Kokoschka. The influence of
German Expressionism favored by Itten was analogous in some ways to the fine arts side of the ongoing debate. This influence culminated with the addition of Der Blaue Reiter founding member Wassily Kandinsky to the faculty and ended when Itten resigned in late 1922. Itten was replaced by the Hungarian designer
László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the
Vorkurs with a leaning towards the New Objectivity favored by Gropius, which was analogous in some ways to the applied arts side of the debate. Although this shift was an important one, it didn't represent a radical break from the past so much as a small step in a broader, more gradual socio-econimic movement that had been going on at least since 1907 when van de Velde had argued for a craft basis for design while
Hermann Muthesius had begun implementing industrial prototypes.
Gropius wasn't necessarily against Expressionism, and in fact himself in the same 1919 pamphlet proclaiming this "new guild of craftsmen, with out the class snobbery," described "painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future." By 1923 however, Gropius was no longer evoking images of soaring
Romanesque cathedrals and the craft-driven aesthetic of the "
Völkisch movement," instead declaring "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars." 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'd 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 stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.
Weimar was in the German state of
Thuringia, and the Bauhaus school received state support from the
Social Democrat-controlled Thuringian state government. In February 1924, the Social Democrats lost control of the state parliament to the
Nationalists. The Ministry of Education placed 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 Gropius 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 regime 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
Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the
Fagus Factory than the stripped down
Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the
Völkisch Sommerfeld House. 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. Meyer became director when Gropius resigned in February 1928, and 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'd 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. 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 before they came to power in 1933, Nazi writers like
Wilhelm Frick and
Alfred Rosenberg had already labeled 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 and social liberals. Indeed, a number of Communist students loyal to Meyer moved to the
Soviet Union when he was fired in 1930.
Even before the Nazis came to power, political pressure on Bauhaus had increased. But the Nazi regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as the foreign, probably
Jewish influences of "cosmopolitan modernism." Despite Gropius's protestations that as a war veteran and a patriot his work had no subversive political intent, the Berlin Bauhaus was closed in April 1933. Mies van der Rohe was expelled from Germany. (The closure, and the response of Mies van der Rohe, is fully documented in Elaine Hochman's
Architects of Fortune.) Curiously, however, some Bauhaus influences lived on in Nazi Germany. When Hitler's chief engineer,
Fritz Todt, began opening the new
autobahn (highways) in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations were "bold examples of modernism" - among those submitting designs was Mies van der Rohe.
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 didn't offer classes in architecture until 1927. The single most profitable tangible product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper. 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 architectural work amounted to unbuilt projects, interior finishes, and craft work like cabinets, chairs and pottery.
In the next two years under Meyer, the architectural focus shifted away from aesthetics and towards functionality. 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.
Mies van der Rohe repudiated Meyer's politics, his supporters, and his architectural approach. As opposed to Gropius's "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 isn't 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 wasn't 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 south-west Berlin, is still occupied, and can be reached by going easily from the U-Bahn stop
Onkel Toms Hütte.
Impact
The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada 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 regime. Tel Aviv, in fact, has been named to the list of
world heritage sites by the UN due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture
(External Link
)(External Link); it had some 4000 Bauhaus buildings erected from 1933 on.
Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in England during the mid 1910s 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. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, 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 at the
Aspen Institute.
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 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
World War II and was operated as a design school with some architectural facilities by the
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
(External Link). In 1979 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 1974 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:
Gallery
Image:Bauhaus-Dessau Festsaal.jpg|A Stage
Image:Bauhaus-Dessau Festsaal Bühnenbeleuchtung.jpg|Ceiling with light fixtures for stage
Image:Bauhaus-Dessau Wohnheim Balkone.jpg|The Studio wing
Image:Bauhaus-Dessau Fensterfront.JPG|Mechanically opened windows
Image:Mensa_Bauhaus_Dessau.PNG|The Mensa (Dining room)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Bauhaus'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://bauhaus.totallyexplained.com">Bauhaus Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
