Bauhaus

Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus was built on the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk—a comprehensive artwork where all the arts, from architecture to weaving, are unified. Gropius aimed to dissolve the "arrogant barrier" between the craftsman and the artist, creating a "new guild" that could meet the needs of a modern society without the class distinctions of the past.

This philosophy was not merely aesthetic but economic. Post-WWI Germany lacked raw materials and relied on a highly skilled labor force to export high-quality goods. The Bauhaus trained a new type of artist who could work directly with industry, ensuring that mass-produced objects—from chairs to tea infusions—retained artistic integrity while being functional and affordable.

The Bauhaus aesthetic, often called the International Style, is defined by what is missing: ornamentation. By removing "elaborate decorations," designers focused on primary geometric shapes—rectangles, spheres, and circles—and the use of modern materials like poured concrete, curved chrome pipes, and glass. The goal was to ensure the form of an object or building followed its specific function.

This shift was radical for its time. Buildings began to feature flat roofs, protruding balconies with "chunky" railings, and long "banks of windows" that invited light into previously dark industrial spaces. Typography and furniture followed suit, utilizing rounded corners and standardized parts to create a clean, consistent look that felt "machine-like" rather than hand-carved.

The Bauhaus was never a static entity; it was a moving target that existed in three cities (Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin) under three distinct directors. The early Weimar years were colored by Johannes Itten’s "Expressionist" influence, which was almost spiritual in nature. However, by 1923, Gropius shifted the focus toward "New Objectivity," famously declaring an architecture "adapted to our world of machines, radios, and fast cars."

Leadership changes brought ideological shifts. Hannes Meyer, the second director, emphasized social utility and "measurements and calculations" over pure art. The final director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, attempted to depoliticize the school to survive Nazi pressure, transforming it into a private architecture-heavy institution before its eventual closure in 1933.

While Gropius is the face of Bauhaus, the movement was part of a broader German trend called Neues Bauen. Before the school even opened, the Deutscher Werkbund (founded in 1907) was already debating whether "standardized parts" could coexist with individual artistic spirit. Figures like Peter Behrens were already integrating art into industrial giants like AEG, proving that corporate identity and high design could scale.

The Bauhaus also had a "sister" school in Russia called Vkhutemas. Both were state-sponsored initiatives attempting to merge craft with modern technology in the wake of world-altering revolutions. These schools represented a global moment where the "liberal spirit" of the 1920s allowed for radical experimentation that the previous conservative regimes had suppressed.

The Nazi party viewed the Bauhaus as a "center of communist intellectualism" and un-German, leading to its dissolution in 1933. However, this suppression backfired; the school’s key figures fled Germany and took their radical ideas with them. Teachers like Moholy-Nagy and Gropius became the avant-garde of American design education, fundamentally reshaping the skylines of cities like Chicago and New York.

The legacy reached as far as the Middle East. The "White City" of Tel Aviv contains the world's highest concentration of Bauhaus-style architecture, built by Jewish architects who emigrated from Germany. What began as a local German experiment in 1919 became the default aesthetic for the modern world, influencing everything from IKEA furniture to the minimalist interfaces of modern smartphones.