The world's most famous architecture school didn't teach architecture for its first eight years.
The Bauhaus lasted just 14 years, moved city twice, had three directors, and closed in 1933 under Nazi pressure. Its manifesto said all creative work aimed at building, yet it offered no architecture classes until 1927. Still, its ideas shaped almost everything modern, from chairs to typefaces to Tel Aviv.
Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus, 'building house', in Weimar in 1919 by merging an art academy with a school of arts and crafts. The idea was to dissolve the wall between fine art and craft and bring all the arts together, with an eye on industry and mass production. Its teachers included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, the weaver Gunta Stölzl and László Moholy-Nagy, and every student began with a preliminary course in materials, form and colour.
The paradox was built in. The founding programme declared that the goal of all creative activity was building, but formal architecture classes only began in 1927; before then, Gropius's own practice did the building. The school moved to Dessau in 1925, into new buildings Gropius designed, then to a disused Berlin factory in 1932. Each move and each director, Gropius, then the radical functionalist Hannes Meyer, then Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, changed its direction.
Politics dogged it throughout. Conservative pressure in Weimar helped push it out; Nazi writers called it 'un-German' and a centre of communist intellectualism, even turning flat roofs into a political issue. The Dessau campus was closed in 1932 after the Nazis won local power, and in 1933 the Gestapo shut the Berlin school, which its leadership then dissolved. About twenty people associated with the Bauhaus are known to have died in prisons or camps.
Exile spread its ideas. Gropius and Marcel Breuer taught at Harvard, Mies became one of the world's leading architects in Chicago, and Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus there. Jewish architects who emigrated to Tel Aviv built its 'White City', over 4,000 buildings in the Bauhaus or International Style. Breuer's Wassily and cantilever chairs and the school's clean, functional graphics became templates for modern design.
Source: Wikipedia — Bauhaus · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
