The Bauhaus School

The Bauhaus was a school for art, design and architecture founded in Weimar, Germany with a core objective “to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts.” Before the Bauhaus was established, fine arts were seen to hold a higher esteem than craftsmanship The Bauhaus intended to change this feeling about the arts. The Bauhaus wanted to create products that were simple in design which as a result could be easily mass produced. Of all the principles taught at the Bauhaus, form follows function summed up the schools main philosophy. Architecture and design should reflect the new period in history, and adapt to the era of the machine was one founding principal of the Bauhaus school. Students began with a preliminary course that taught the basic Bauhaus theory and then were allowed to enter into specialized workshops. Throughout the years, it moved to Dessau and then Berlin and ending with the closure by Nazi soldiers. As a result of its existence, the Bauhaus had a major impact on art, design, and architecture trends throughout the rest of the century.

The ideology of the Bauhaus was conceived when Walter Gropius, a German architect, sought for a unification of the arts through craft. Gropius wanted to end the division between industry and art by training students equally in both crafts and fine arts. In 1919, the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts merged together into what is known as the Bauhaus, or “house of construction.” Walter Gropius was appointed director and described the school as “a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression” in his Proclamation of the Bauhaus. Gropius soon developed a curriculum in which he combin...

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... that unity to mass produce products and beautiful art has earned it the right to be known as the House of Construction.

Works Cited

Bayer, Herbert, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius. Bauhaus, 1919-1928. Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1952. Print.

Neumann, Eckhard. Bauhaus and Bauhaus People; Personal Opinions and Recollections of Former Bauhaus Members and Their Contemporaries. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970. Print.

Whitford, Frank. Bauhaus. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Print.

“Bauhaus.” Encyclopedia Britannica (2013): Research Starters. Web. 1 May 2014.

"The Three Bauhaus Locations." Graphic Design History. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2014.

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Winton, Alexandra G. "The Bauhaus, 1919–1933." The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. 03 May 2014.

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