Bauhaus

Bauhaus, German school of architecture and design that had inestimable influence on modern architecture, the industrial and graphic arts, and theatre design. It was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius as an amalgamation of the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. The principles of the Bauhaus, based on those of the 19th-century English craftsman and writer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, were that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. They also depended on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good design must be both aesthetically pleasing and technically sound. Thus, classes were offered in crafts, typography, and commercial and industrial design, as well as in sculpture, painting, and architecture.

The Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornament and ostentatious façades and by harmony between function and the artistic and technical means of manufacture.

In 1925 the Bauhaus was moved into a group of starkly rectangular glass and concrete buildings in Dessau especially designed for it by Gropius. In Dessau the Bauhaus style became more strictly functional, with greater emphasis on showing the beauty and suitability of basic, unadorned materials. Other outstanding architects and artists on the staff of the Bauhaus included the Swiss painter Paul Klee, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, the Hungarian painter and designer László Moholy-Nagy (who founded the Chicago Institute of Design on the principles of the Bauhaus), the American painter Lyonel Feininger, and the German painter Oskar Schlemmer.

In 1930 the Bauhaus came under the direction of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who moved it to Berlin in 1932. By 1933, when the school was closed by the Nazis, its principles and work were known worldwide. Many of its staff members emigrated to the United States, where the teachings of the Bauhaus came to dominate art and architecture for decades and strongly contributed to the architectural style known as International Style. In 1996, Bauhaus buildings in Weimar and Dessau were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.