BAUHAUS.

The Bauhaus is widely regarded as the single most influential school of art, architecture, and design in the twentieth century. Founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 by the Thuringian state, the school, led by the architect Walter Gropius, featured an all-star faculty that included such luminaries as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, and many others. Gropius, an ambitious school director whom the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde had recommended as his successor upon van de Velde's dismissal in 1915, successfully combined the Weimar Academy of Art and what remained of van de Velde's Weimar School of Applied Arts into a single institution after World War I. Under his leadership, the school quickly broadened its mission to promote a radical fusion of the fine arts, the decorative arts, architecture, and industrial design. The Bauhaus's innovative introductory course, developed initially by Johannes Itten, together with the school's production of numerous formally innovative industrial prototypes, left many aspects of pre–World War I applied-arts teaching far behind. Rising to become the standard bearer of a reformed, modern artistic culture, the Bauhaus, Gropius proclaimed, would lead postwar German society in a process of artistic, social, and cultural renewal.

From its beginning in 1919, however, the school struggled against right-wing political forces that denounced the Bauhaus and its forward-looking, experimental artistic and cultural pedagogy as a menace to traditional German culture. Constantly embattled, underfunded, and forced to leave the cities of Weimar, Dessau, and later Berlin, the school functioned as a kind of crucible for Germany's avant-garde. The Bauhaus drew strength from its affiliations and its affinities to such peer European movements as Russian constructivism, Dada, surrealism, and the Dutch De Stijl movement—precisely the international influences that conservative nationalists, and later Hitler's National Socialists, saw as such a threat to native German traditions. Aided in part by exhibitions and publicity received after the emigration of Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the United States, the Bauhaus's reputation achieved mythical status, towering over all other modern German schools of design. The dizzying number of historical reinterpretations of the Bauhaus that have accumulated since its dissolution in 1933 have, in fact, functioned as a veritable index of Western cultural trends and preoccupations ever since.

THURINGIA

The Thuringian state initially founded the State Bauhaus in Weimar (Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar) in 1919 for the purpose of reviving the crafts. As the thirty-five-year-old Gropius wrote when he sought budget approval from Thurinigian authorities in 1919, the Bauhaus would promote "a proliferation of the crafts and industry in the state of Weimar as a result of the re-molding of the schools in accordance with a craft-oriented, practical approach" (Wingler, p. 26). This agenda quickly expanded as, in response to the left-wing political ferment that followed World War I, Gropius assembled a broad-based, experimental faculty of artists and designers to facilitate Germany's postwar cultural renewal. Political attacks and controversy soon led Gropius to promote an official school policy of "nonalignment" in political matters. This in no way dampened the experimental nature of the school's broad-based curriculum, however. In addition to a bracing, six-month introductory course (Vorkurs) designed to unburden students of historicist thinking and unleash their individual creative potential, the school established practical instructional workshops in woodworking, ceramics, book binding, weaving, metalworking, and sculpture. Leading artists further taught courses in painting, art theory, typography, and set design, and the school collectively explored a variety of performance-based media, including music and experimental theater. Architecture, considered by Gropius to be the "mother of all the arts," after John Ruskin's dictum of half a century earlier, did not become an official Bauhaus department until the school relocated with new energy and funding in Dessau in 1926.

Rather than representing any particular philosophy or defined approach to design, the Bauhaus was, as the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously characterized it, always "an idea." That is, the school was always the collective product of its faculty, students, and three successive directors, whose experimental inclinations were highlighted by contributions from particular, highly individualistic, and influential instructors. Thus Gropius, the director from 1919 to 1928, presided over the Bauhaus's initial crafts and expressionist phases, which lasted into the early 1920s. By 1923, Gropius felt compelled to dismiss the innovative Swiss painter Johannes Itten, a charismatic instructor and follower of Mazdaznan religious traditions, in order to consolidate his leadership of the school and reconnect its curriculum to resurgent German industry and the product design fields. For this new phase, Gropius adopted a fresh school slogan, "Art and Technology: A New Unity," which became the title of an influential Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923.

DESSAU, BERLIN, AND BEYOND

Defeated and driven out of Weimar by victorious right-wing nationalist parties in the Thuringian state legislature in early 1925, the Bauhaus found a generous new patron in Fritz Hesse, mayor of Dessau, a town located roughly halfway between Weimar and Berlin. Funding organized by Hesse's administration enabled Gropius to complete an iconic, self-consciously modern industrial school building based on his own designs in 1926. The Dessau Bauhaus's asymmetrical plan and separate wings, containing glass curtain-walled workshops, a dormitory tower, and classrooms—all linked by a dramatic "bridge" that housed the school administration—acted as a visible manifesto of the Bauhaus outlook. In addition, Hesse's patronage made possible the construction of individual "masters' houses" that Gropius designed for himself and senior Bauhaus faculty. Although the school's operating budget was still tight, a newly founded architecture department thrived with such commissions as the experimental Törten housing estate, which used Gropius's methods for serial production of more than three hundred housing units constructed of standardized parts. At the same time, a growing number of Bauhaus posters and specially designed publications helped establish the school as a popular center for the German and European avant-garde. Faculty such as Moholy-Nagy and later Albers took the Bauhaus introductory course in new directions, and other courses explored new technologies and utopian design schemes as ways of pushing students to think beyond the range of customary product design and interior design.

By 1928 resurgent local political opposition and a desire to devote more time to his architectural practice prompted Gropius to hand over directorship of the Dessau Bauhaus to the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer, an avowed socialist from the Swiss collectivist-constructivist school, emphasized utilitarian, affordable designs of everyday products using industrial materials and scientific design methods. Sacrificing art in favor of technical excellence, individual will in favor of collective purpose, and the luxury product in favor of the useful commodity, Meyer shocked the painters Klee, Kandinsky, and Feininger. Meyer's reorientation of the school toward a "radical functionalism" further prompted the resignations of Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. Nevertheless, the school's new cult of scientific reason, socialism, and sober pragmatism enabled Meyer to enlarge the school's connections to German industrial producers, who cooperated in the production of iconic Bauhaus prototypes for light fittings, wallpaper, glassware, and other successful products. Older handcrafts workshops were replaced by new departments of photography and interior design, whose workshops were characterized as laboratories rather than studios.

Meyer's radicalism fired local opposition in Dessau, which led to his resignation in 1930. He was succeeded by Mies van der Rohe. When local Dessau municipal politics led to the closure of the Bauhaus in 1932, Mies van der Rohe moved the school to Berlin. Greatly reduced in size and scope, the curriculum emphasized architecture as a systematic and rigorous practice in accordance with Mies van der Rohe's philosophy. Typical student assignments included spending months perfecting designs for a simple single-family home that was extremely carefully planned in terms of materials, space, and structure. In 1933, Nazi pressures led Mies van der Rohe and his faculty to close the Berlin-based school, but the Bauhaus idea was carried elsewhere. The appointments of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Breuer, Albers, and Moholy-Nagy to leading positions at Harvard University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and other schools in the United States in the late 1930s ensured that various permutations of Bauhaus thinking and methodology would alter the way many Americans and American businesses would come to think about design and modern life. In Germany, the Swiss Bauhaus graduate Max Bill would found and direct the Hochschule für Gestaltung (school of design) in the south German city of Ulm beginning in 1955. The Ulm school operated as Germany's leading post–World War II Bauhaus successor institution until its closure in 1968. Only during the 1960s, when architects such as Robert Venturi and Philip Johnson rebelled against a somewhat caricatured image of Bauhaus dogmatism and perceived modernist universalism, did the Bauhaus's reputation significantly wane. Nevertheless, the school's impact on the design world and the progressive, experimental spirit of much of contemporary architecture and design education continues to be felt.

See alsoArchitecture; Constructivism; Dada; Gropius, Walter; Kandinsky, Wassily; Klee, Paul; Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig; Moholy-Nagy, László.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Betts, Paul. "The Bauhaus as Cold-War Legend: West German Modernism Revisited." German Politics and Society 14 (summer 1996): 75–100.

Fiedler, Jeannine, and Peter Feierabend, eds. Bauhaus. Cologne, 2000.

Franciscono, Marcel. Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years. Urbana, Ill., 1971.

Kentgens-Craig, Margret. The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919–1936. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

Maciuika, John V. Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920. Cambridge and New York, 2005.

Naylor, Gillian. The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory. New York, 1985.

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Wingler, Hans Maria. The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. Translated by W. Jabs and Basil Gilbert. Cambridge, Mass., 1969.

John V. Maciuika