Bauhaus
also: Staatliches Bauhaus
The Bauhaus (literally "building house") was the German school of art, design, and architecture founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, which aimed to erase the boundary between fine art and applied craft and to train designers for the machine age. Moving to a landmark new building in Dessau in 1925 and on to Berlin, it was closed under Nazi pressure in 1933 - but not before its workshops in metal, textiles, cabinetmaking, typography, and theatre had produced a durable visual language: geometric clarity, honest materials, and functional elegance. Under Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as directors, and with masters from Kandinsky to Anni Albers, the school's ideas - and its emigre teachers - reshaped design education and modern architecture worldwide.
Defining characteristics
- Geometric clarity: primary forms, grids, and asymmetrical balance
- Truth to materials - steel tubing, glass, and plywood left to speak for themselves
- Functional elegance: form driven by use and industrial production, not ornament
- Clean sans-serif typography and uncluttered layouts
- Primary colors (red, yellow, blue) set against black, white, and gray
- Art, craft, and technology united in a single designed object or building
Key figures
- Walter Gropius (1883-1969) — Architect who founded the Bauhaus and directed it to 1928
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) — Last director (1930-1933); distilled the school's architecture to steel and glass
- Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) — Head of the cabinet workshop; designer of tubular-steel furniture
- Anni Albers (1899-1994) — Weaver who transformed the textile workshop and modern textile design
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) — Painter and Bauhaus master who taught abstract form and color theory
Example works
- Wassily Chair — Marcel Breuer (1925-1926)
- Barcelona chair — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1929)
- Bauhaus Building, Dessau — Walter Gropius (1926)
Sources
- Bauhaus - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Bauhaus - The Art Story critical