What’s Bauhaus? Every part you want to know
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The quilt of the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto featured an expressionist woodcut of a Gothic cathedral with dazzling stars taking pictures beams from its towers. Drawn by Bauhaus founder architect Walter Gropius, the manifesto kicked off with the phrase ‘The last word objective of all artwork is the constructing.’
But the Bauhaus, which has come to signify greater than something a mode of stripped, modernist, practical structure, didn’t initially even have an structure division. It’s only one in every of a plethora of paradoxes about essentially the most well-known artwork college ever. The Bauhaus, we have now to recollect, was by no means only one factor.
Bauhaus constructing Dessau, architect Walter Gropius, southwest view, building website photograph, 1926
(Picture credit score: Bauhaus Dessau Basis (I 14409 F) / (LuciaMoholy (née Schulz)) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024 / © (Walter Gropius) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024 / Picture by Google)
What’s Bauhaus structure?
Based within the wake of the devastation of the First World Conflict, which left Germany overwhelmed, impoverished, shamed and traumatised, Bauhaus was meant as a brand new guild, primarily based on a medieval mannequin during which the crafts could possibly be unified to serve a contemporary agenda. The cathedral on that cowl represented the zenith of the western Gesamtkunstwerk (a ‘whole murals’ in German), a constructing that embodied symbolism and which means, stonework, utilized arts, geometry and collaboration.
At the moment, although, after we consider Bauhaus, we most likely consider a specific model; the white villas of the Twenties and 30s, rigorous blocks of repetitive flats or the tubular chairs of Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. We’d additionally consider all of the issues that the phrase ‘Bauhaus’ is utilized to, the modernist condo blocks of Stuttgart, Budapest, Bucharest or Tel Aviv.
A constructing in Tel Aviv’s White Metropolis, the place in response to the World Monument Fund is ‘one of many world’s largest concentrations of Bauhaus structure’
(Picture credit score: TBC)
Bauhaus: its origins and scope
If the Bauhaus is understood for management, perfection and modernist minimalism, its beginnings had been surprisingly various and a bit of chaotic. There was the abstraction of artists Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, the pottery, ceramics and textiles of the ladies designers who had been excluded from the artwork studios and furnishings workshops, which had been the protect of males, and there was images, metalwork, theatre and graphics and extra. Its beginnings had been steeped not in functionalism however in mysticism, within the cultish environment of devotion, such because the monkish manner of painter and designer Johannes Itten together with his occult leanings and adherence to the odd pseudo-religion of Mazdaznan (a motion aiming to raise consciousness by way of physique and spirit). It solely slowly shed these extra eclectic leanings as director Gropius pursued a extra rigorous line in the direction of modernist structure and design.
Over the course of the Twenties, the college started to shift in the direction of a extra architectural method and by the point Hannes Meyer and later Mies van der Rohe had been in cost (1928-1933), structure had turn into firmly established as its key legacy.
Development staff within the shell of the workshop wing of the Bauhaus constructing in Dessau, 1926
(Picture credit score: © Archive of Modernism Weimar, BBA 953)
Bauhaus manages to be each a badge of honour and an insult. To those that adore it, it’s the pinnacle of modernism; pure, clear, trustworthy, revolutionary and practical. For others, it exemplifies the pretension, conceitedness, inhumanity and fakery of fashionable structure.
In structure, its options have turn into cliché but nonetheless usually look astonishingly fashionable. Take the Bauhaus constructing itself. Designed by Walter Gropius in Dessau (the place the college had moved to from Weimar) in 1925-26, it was meant to look industrial; a manufacturing facility of concepts and pictures in addition to manufacturing. The glass curtain partitions dematerialised its presence whereas creating light-filled interiors, one other factor seems as a bridge, seemingly floating over a central backbone route, equally gentle and ethereal.
Ribbon home windows intensify its horizontality, indicating the course of journey inside the constructing. On one wall, a grid of small balconies casts a photogenic sample of shadows and seems nearly like diving boards from which to launch into the long run. Supplies are concrete, metal and glass (not less than, they’re made to look like). It’s a constructing which, a century after it was designed, nonetheless seems to be modern, and that’s as a result of the Bauhaus outlined our concept of what fashionable ought to appear to be.
Bauhaus stage, Pantomime ‘Treppenwitz’ by Oskar Schlemmer on the roof of the studio constructing, 1927
(Picture credit score: Bauhaus Dessau Basis (I 14306 F), Picture:Erich Consemüller / © (Erich Consemüller) StephanConsemüller / © (Walter Gropius) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn2024)
We’d additionally have a look at the Masters’ Homes (1925, Gropius once more) designed for his colleagues, Marcel Breuer, Klee and Kandinsky. They’re blocky, uneven and Constructivist, revelling of their composition as apparently summary architectural sculptures which are literally meticulously designed to swimsuit their functions, expressing the volumes inside. They continue to be, in a approach, the mannequin for modernist villas, with roof decks, nautical railings and blocky, boxy varieties. And, maybe most of all, white partitions. The white expressed a brand new purity of kind, a departure from the gray tones of the soiled, polluted metropolis into an idealised perfection, structure as clear and stuffed with potential as a crisp new sheet of paper.
The fabric was alleged to be concrete, that protean matter which could possibly be moulded into any fashionable kind. In truth, it was largely brick, rendered with plaster to look fashionable. Concrete was nonetheless costly and uncommon. Brick and block had been low cost and ubiquitous. Right here, we see one thing of the Bauhaus that was so usually parodied, a willingness to sacrifice precise integrity for the looks of integrity. Mies van der Rohe was additionally later parodied for sticking metal I-beams onto the outsides of his buildings as a result of he’d needed to cowl up the true structural components for fireproofing. For a motion steeped in concepts about morality, it was notably keen to compromise.
Simply because the furnishings, the bent metal tubes and glass had been meant to look mass-produced, match for the mechanical age, however had been truly made by craftsmen creating costly handmade items. The structure was about an concept of mass manufacturing aimed toward a mannequin of employee housing, however made by hand.
Architect Walter Gropius, the person behind the design of the Bauhaus Dessau college constructing
(Picture credit score: Louis Held)
On the coronary heart of the Bauhaus was an concept of design for all, of design as a pressure for social good the last word objective of which was the creation of a brand new, extra equitable world of respectable housing for the working lessons, of inexperienced areas and environment friendly buildings, well-lit, well-ventilated and match for a brand new openness of on a regular basis life. It posed the ending of compartmented, small, darkish rooms for open plan areas and balconies and roof terraces. It promoted communal eating rooms and amenities, a brand new way of life along with the Bauhaus college in Dessau as its mannequin. It was socially deterministic in a fashion that has turn into deeply retro – the suggestion was that architects might mould society by way of their buildings to turn into higher.
There have been many experiments, most notably the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart (1927) with its mass of mannequin housing, white-walled blocks designed by architects from Mies van der Rohe to Le Corbusier to suggest a brand new way of life within the inexperienced of the suburbs.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (design), Berliner Metallgewerbe Josef Müller (manufacture),Tubular metal stool, 1927
(Picture credit score: Bauhaus Dessau Basis (I 7375 M) / © (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024 / Picture: Esther Hoyer)
Bauhaus: an evolution
However the goals by no means fairly materialised. The aesthetic was taken up by the mental bourgeoisie whereas the proletariat remained suspicious. Many of the Bauhaus architects ended up engaged on middle-class villas within the suburban hills. Wander across the leafy suburbs of Budapest or Berlin, Brno or Bucharest, and you will see that beautiful white-walled villas, usually crumbling a bit of, the legacy of the style of Bauhaus model. The acquainted components coalesced into that very recognisable model. There have been large image home windows and slim strip home windows. There was an try to interrupt down the divisions between inner and exterior area, with terraces and balconies being handled as solar rooms. There have been fluid interiors, rejecting compartmentalisation in favour of open plans. These had been blocky white buildings but additionally ones usually augmented by curved corners or semi-circular balconies or towers – all primarily based on the platonic geometries beloved of the Bauhaus founder, the back-to-basics set of constructing blocks.
There have been oceanliner handrails (as a result of what could possibly be extra practical than a ship?) and there have been stripped-down fittings – from door handles to lights, usually resembling industrial engineering greater than home design. There have been dramatic stairs in cylindrical towers or with open treads, or industrial metal spirals. The mouldings of conventional homes had been banished together with fireplaces and sculptural plasterwork. Heavy furnishings was disbanded in favour of tubular metal and glass, objects which had been nearly clear, that forged no darkish shadows. Kitchens had been inbuilt and small, practical areas which celebrated effectivity somewhat than conviviality. And there have been no cellars or attics, solely flat roofs – not one of the darkish repositories of reminiscence or nostalgia.
The extent to which we are able to itemise these components and archetypes is a bit of ironic, in fact. Gropius and Mies had been trying to flee model, to drive at an goal, practical structure, which was irrefutable in its practicality. But model it turned.
Tom Wolfe, in his scathing ebook ‘From Bauhaus to Our Home’ (1981), mirrored on the appropriation of a worker-housing aesthetic utilized to every part from faculties to company workplaces. After the Second World Conflict you would possibly argue that it was Bauhaus structure that impressed the explosion in social housing blocks set in inexperienced areas which proliferated throughout the sides of cities all over the world.
Illuminated workshop wing, Bauhaus constructing Dessau, 2021
(Picture credit score: Bauhaus Dessau Basis / Picture: Thomas Meyer /OSTKREUZ)
What does Bauhaus imply as we speak?
Now the phrase ‘Bauhaus’ has turn into ubiquitous and a bit of meaningless as a consequence. László Tóth, the fictional protagonist of 2024 movie ‘The Brutalist’ was, in fact, skilled on the Bauhaus. It’s a code in order that we perceive he was there on the supply of modernism. Hungarians had been certainly outstanding there; there was Marcel Breuer and there was Farkas Molnár, who designed the primary ever Bauhaus residence, the Pink Home of 1923, which was by no means constructed. And most of all, there was László Moholy-Nagy who ran the well-known basis course and set the tone, even when he wasn’t himself an architect.
Bauhaus (actually ‘home of constructing’) is simply too good a phrase. There was a band named after it and a German DIY retailer. It’s universally utilized to condo blocks in Tel Aviv, few of whose designers had something to do with the Bauhaus, though they could have come from the identical central European backgrounds. It’s universally utilized throughout Europe to check with inter-war modernism of a sure sort, simply as Brutalism turned the go-to description for something post-war, concrete and sculptural.
Anni Albers, weaving – the artist’s textile artwork was revived at Milan Design Week 2025 by Dedar with the Josef & Anni Albers Basis
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Herbert F Johnson Museum of Artwork,Cornell College)
The Bauhaus itself lasted solely until 1933, when the Nazis made it inconceivable to proceed. By then, its director was Mies van der Rohe, who would later to migrate to the US and take his (somewhat extra luxuriously minimal) model of the Bauhaus to Chicago, the place it arguably had a good larger influence, not on employee housing however on company America.
At the moment, the concept of the Bauhaus has a tinge of asceticism, of a form of practical puritanism. But a have a look at the photographs of the college in on a regular basis motion reveals a world of events and balls, of goofy photographs and radical theatre. The college seems to be full of girls, because it certainly was, and so they appear to be they’re having fun with themselves. Their efforts are actually being reassessed with figures like Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt and Eva Zeisel being lastly given their due, albeit outdoors structure. It is perhaps price remembering that, in addition to a legacy of austere homes and condo blocks that appear to be factories, the Bauhaus was most likely, in opposition to all expectations and reputations, additionally loads of enjoyable.
Examples of Bauhaus structure
The Bauhaus Dessau, Germany, by Walter Gropius
(Picture credit score: Bauhaus Dessau Basis / Picture: Thomas Meyer /OST-KREUZ)
Masters’ Homes, Dessau, Germany, by Walter Gropius
The Bauhaus Grasp Home Kandinsky-Klee
(Picture credit score: Picture by ANTON ROLAND LAUBAFP through Getty Pictures)
Barcelona Pavilion, Spain, by Mies van der Rohe
Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion celebrated 30 years in 2016
(Picture credit score: Pictures: Rafa Vargas)
Doldertal Condo Constructing, Zurich, Switzerland, by Marcel Breuer
(Picture credit score: Roland zh)
ADGB Commerce Union Faculty, Bern, Berlin, by Hannes Meyer
(Picture credit score: Kritzolina)
Dalnoki-Kovats villa, Budapest, Hungary, by Farkas Molnar
2025 marks the a centesimal anniversary of the Bauhaus Faculty’s transfer from Weimar to its iconic house in Dessau, Germany, designed by Walter Gropius. To mark the event, a programme of exhibitions, conferences and festivals organised by the Bauhaus Dessau Basis will happen within the metropolis of Dessau from September 2025 to March 2026.
For extra info go to bauhaus-dessau.de
