Perhaps no trend within Modern architecture so neatly captures the imagination as the almost mythic status of the Bauhaus. Emerging in Dessau, Germany, during the shocking aftermath of World War I, the famed institution was conceived as a reformation of applied... [more]

Perhaps no trend within Modern architecture so neatly captures the imagination as the almost mythic status of the Bauhaus. Emerging in Dessau, Germany, during the shocking aftermath of World War I, the famed institution was conceived as a reformation of applied arts education. The principle was simple: to reject the salon arts of the haute-bourgeoisie in favor of a craft tradition in order to erase the class distinctions between artist and craftsman. Yet this was not a rejection of the modernizing impulses of the rapidly industrializing, urbanizing German state (one that was facing an increasingly dire socio-economic predicament). Instead, as developed by Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, the applied arts were to be taught in a workshop-based design education, with a reconciliation of craft design and industrial production. Under the tutelage of pioneering Modernists, including Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Theo Van Doesberg, the Bauhaus students produced work inspired by a stripped-down, functional aesthetic, one obviously influenced by Russian Constructivism. Their approach rejected the classical notion of composition through contrasting materials and forms -- instead, it sought to bring out aesthetic properties inherent in the materials themselves, as revealed through their disjunction and arrangement in space. Indeed, from Herbert Bayer's sans-serif typography to Gropius's seminal Bauhaus building of 1926, there emerged an objective sensibility that championed elements devoid of ornamentation and excessive detail. The objective approach led to an embrace of a serialized industrial production process that was applied to any variety of craftmaking, from the assembly of chairs to the weaving of tapestries. The presence of prominent Modern architects -- including Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Mart Stam -- brought to the school a heady mix of political philosophies and aesthetic theories. The functionalist approach of the Bauhaus was a natural breeding ground for the development of a socially responsible design programme. Yet given its progressive spirit, the institution was unwittingly doomed to failure. Internal political squabbling, channeled through the increasingly open socialist position of the school, led to dissension within the faculty. Droves of the early staff, including Gropius, abandoned ship. The rise of the Nazi Regime, with its dismissal of Modern architecture as "degenerate art," sealed the fate of the Bauhaus. Not even Mies van der Rohe's stewardship could negotiate the institution's autonomy when faced with such intolerance. By 1932, the institution was closed, its students and professors, some consigned to their fates at the hands of the Nazis, scattered. The lucky few reached the sanctuary of America, where their once-progressive design curricula would become the basis for a revitalized and heady post-war design education, centered in such places as the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. [show less]