The Bauhaus was an influential art school in Germany that is often credited with inspiring the rise of 20th-century modernist design in architecture, typography, industrial design, and other disciplines. Over time, Bauhaus has come to refer to both the school and the aesthetic—bold, clean, bright, and practical—associated with it.
The school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius as the Bauhaus State School, a utopian institution for collaboration and anti-elitist art. The school moved three times to escape political pressure, but finally closed in 1933 when its leaders, including director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, refused to incorporate Nazi ideology into its curriculum.
Following its closure, Bauhaus-affiliated artists spread across the globe, with prominent groups settling in Tel Aviv, Chicago, and North Carolina, among other places. The artists' relocations helped lead to the school's style and spirit becoming a major 20th-century aesthetic.
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The Bauhaus school had a profound impact on 20th-century architecture, from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Switzerland to the Poli House in Israel. This list from Artsy shows you eight of the most important Bauhaus buildings, including the school's second location in Dessau, Germany.
The Bauhaus style has become so commonplace that you might not have realized its influence on modern furniture, but the German school's impact is profound, from the Wassily and Barcelona chairs to Gropius' industrial style door knob.
The design school was short-lived but immensely impactful, turning design in architecture, typography, and a number of other fields away from superfluous ornamentation and toward practical, straightforward expression. This history of the movement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art outlines its major figures, key events, and the ways its influence persists.
In "Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar," Walter Gropius' 1919 manifesto, the architect imagined his Bauhaus school as a "guild of craftsmen" where architects, painters, and sculptors could be freed from the class-oriented pretensions of the art world and learn to make works that would benefit humanity.
The Bauhaus was an experimental school that prized interdisciplinary collaboration, blurring the lines between architecture, industrial design, theater, and other creative fields. Walter Gropius, the school's founder, lays out the ideas behind the school's unique curriculum in "The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus," a 1923 manifesto.
The Bauhaus was located in Germany, but it welcomed students and teachers from across the world. Its collaborative spirit meant that the work it produced considered the many histories and perspectives of its international community. When the school was dissolved, those designers then spread across the globe, bringing the new style with them. This timeline from the Director of Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau details how the process unfolded.
The influential design school began in Weimar, then moved to Dessau and later to Berlin. This narrated timeline from Graphic Design History explains how Gropius' countercultural educational and artistic philosophies forced the school to move and, ultimately, leave Gropius behind.
The Bauhaus style valued objects' functions above all else and, as such, largely did away with the ornate decoration of previous styles such as Victorian, colonial, or Art Deco. Instead, Bauhaus used primary colors, clean lines, and exposed industrial elements to create simple but sleek buildings, products, and typefaces.
Walk around almost any major metropolitan area, and you'll see Bauhaus' influence in the glass facades, tubular steel, and windows offering ample natural light. This ArchDaily explainer illustrates those concepts through iconic Bauhaus buildings, such as the Gropius House, along with detailed diagrams of their design.
Following World War I, the Nazi Party used the ornamental Fraktur typeface, hoping to give its materials a classical sheen. The Bauhaus school responded with a sleeker design style, including bolder, rounder fontfaces. Quartz digs into the history behind that decision and how the style can still be found in widely used typefaces like Helvetica.
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