Bauhaus Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- Alternate use: There is also a British rock band named Bauhaus.
The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, by merging the Grand Ducal School of the Plastic Arts with the Kunstgewerberschule. Most of the contents of the workshops had been sold off during the war. The early intention was that the Bauhaus should be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. This was a basis of much internal and external conflict that followed.
Gropius felt that a new period of history had begun with the end of World War I, and wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style for architecture as well as consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and intended for mass production. For that purpose Gropius wanted to re-unite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic pretensions. He was the head of the school from 1919-1928, followed by Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The Bauhaus was largely subsidized by the early Weimar Republic. After a change in government, the school moved to Dessau in 1925, where the Bauhaus University was built. In 1927, the Bauhaus style and its most famous architects influenced heavily the exhibition "Die Wohnung" ("The flat" ) organized by "Deutscher Werkbund" in Stuttgart. A major component of that exhibition was the Weissenhof Estate.
The Bauhaus was moved again in 1932 to Berlin.
The school was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime in 1933. The Nazis had been opposed to the Bauhaus throughout the 1920s, as had other right-wing political groups. The Bauhaus was considered by them to be a front for communists, especially because many Russian artists were involved with it. Nazi writers such as Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg felt that the Bauhaus was "un-German," and did not approve of its modernist styles. However, the Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in western Europe and the United States in the following decades, as many of the artists involved were exiled under the Nazi regime.
The school was mainly concerned with architecture, and often built affordable public housing for the Weimar government, but also dealt with other branches of art. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called "Bauhaus" and a series of books called "Bauhausbücher". Its head of printing and design was Herbert Bayer.
One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft and technology. The machine was considered a positive element and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs – literally 'before course' – was taught; this is the modern day Basic Design course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural schools all over the world. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created by first principles rather than through precedent.
The most important contribution of Bauhaus is in the field of furniture design. The world famous and ubiquitous Cantilever chair by designer Mart Stam, using the tensile properties of steel, is an example.
For an example of Bauhaus-influenced industrial architecture, see Beijing's Joint Factory 718, built by East German experts from 1951 to 1957.
The Bauhaus school inspired the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus which existed from 1953 to 1957.
In 1999 Bauhaus-Dessau Collage started to organize postgraduate programs with participants from all over the world by the support of Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation which was founded in 1994 as a public institution.
Some other outstanding artists of the times were lecturers at the Bauhaus :
- Josef Albers
- Marcel Breuer
- Lyonel Feininger
- Johannes Itten
- Wassily Kandinsky
- Paul Klee
- Gerhard Marcks
- László Moholy-Nagy
- Georg Muche
- Hinnerk Scheper
- Oskar Schlemmer
- Joost Schmidt
- Lothar Schreyer
- Gunda Stölzl
- Marianne Brandt
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Bauhaus was also the name of a British band in the 1980s - see Bauhaus (band) & Gothic rock
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