Bauhaus Movement

The Bauhaus was a German school of art, design, and architecture that existed for only fourteen years — from 1919 to 1933 — yet it permanently changed how buildings, furniture, typefaces, and household objects look. Founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, it operated in three cities under three directors before the Nazi regime forced it to close, scattering its teachers across the world and turning a small school into a global movement.

What the Bauhaus Actually Was

The Bauhaus was not a style at first — it was an institution. In 1919, the provisional government of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach merged the Weimar School of Applied Arts with the neighbouring Academy of Fine Arts into a single school, and on the recommendation of Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, the Berlin architect Walter Gropius was invited to lead it. Gropius asked to rename the institution Staatliches Bauhaus, literally “state building house,” and the new school opened on 1 April 1919.

Its founding idea was the Gesamtkunstwerk — a “comprehensive artwork” in which architecture, sculpture, painting, and craft would no longer be separate disciplines. Gropius set this out in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which imagined something closer to a utopian craft guild than a conventional academy. Just as radical for its time was the insistence that craftspeople and artists, masters and students, held equal standing.

Three Cities, Three Directors, Fourteen Years

The school moved twice, and both moves were political rather than practical. Right-wing pressure in Weimar cut its funding, and pressure in Dessau eventually did the same, until the final Berlin incarnation survived barely a year.

Period	City	Director	What defined it
1919–1925	Weimar	Walter Gropius	Expressionist, craft-driven founding years; the preliminary course takes shape
1925–1932	Dessau	Gropius (to 1928), then Hannes Meyer (1928–1930), then Mies van der Rohe (from 1930)	The purpose-built Gropius school building; a shift toward industry, mass production, and social housing
1932–1933	Berlin	Ludwig Mies van der Rohe	A private institution in a former telephone factory in Steglitz; closed in 1933

The Dessau years produced the movement’s defining artefact: the Bauhaus Building itself, designed by Gropius and built between 1925 and 1926 with the involvement of students and teachers. Its glass curtain wall, asymmetric wings, and refusal of ornament made it one of the most copied buildings of the twentieth century.

The Core Principles

• Unity of the arts. Painting, weaving, metalwork, typography, and building were treated as one continuous problem rather than separate professions.
• Form follows function. Objects were designed around use, materials, and manufacture — a geometric, abstract language with no historical quotation and little sentimentality.
• Design for everyone. Especially under Hannes Meyer, the goal was improving ordinary living conditions through affordable, reproducible housing and household goods.
• Learning by making. Teaching happened in workshops, not lecture halls, with students and masters working side by side.
• Art plus industry. After the move to Dessau, the school actively pursued prototypes for factory production and licensing income.

How Students Were Taught

Every student began with the Vorkurs, a preliminary course that stripped away academic habits and rebuilt visual thinking from first principles: colour theory, material experiments, texture studies, and basic geometry. Only after passing it could students enter a specialised workshop — weaving, metal, cabinetmaking, wall painting, printing and advertising, stagecraft, or, later, architecture.

This two-stage structure is the Bauhaus’s quietest but most durable export. Foundation-year programmes in art and design schools worldwide still follow essentially the same logic.

The People Who Made It

The Bauhaus attracted avant-garde figures from across Europe, and the roster of masters reads like a syllabus of modernism.

Figure	Role	Contribution
Walter Gropius	Founder and director, 1919–1928	Wrote the founding manifesto; designed the Dessau Bauhaus Building
Hannes Meyer	Director, 1928–1930	Pushed the school toward social function, science, and cooperative housing
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe	Director, 1930–1933	Reoriented teaching around architecture; later shaped American modernism
Wassily Kandinsky	Master, wall painting	Abstraction and colour theory as a teachable system
Paul Klee	Master	Pictorial form theory; his teaching notebooks remain in use
László Moholy-Nagy	Master, metal workshop and preliminary course	Photography, light, and new media experimentation
Johannes Itten	Master, preliminary course	Devised the influential foundation curriculum and colour studies
Marcel Breuer	Student, then master, furniture	Tubular-steel furniture, including the Wassily chair
Oskar Schlemmer	Master, theatre workshop	Extended Bauhaus form-thinking into performance and costume
Anni and Josef Albers	Weaving and glass, then teaching	Carried Bauhaus pedagogy into American art education

Objects That Left the Workshop

Bauhaus workshops were expected to generate prototypes, not just exercises, and a handful became permanent fixtures of design history. Marcel Breuer’s bent tubular-steel club chair, later marketed as the Wassily, translated bicycle-frame technology into domestic furniture. Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s glass-and-metal table lamp reduced a light source to a sphere, a cylinder, and a disc. Herbert Bayer’s experiments in sans-serif, lowercase-only typography anticipated the visual grammar of modern corporate identity.

The weaving workshop — for decades the most commercially successful department, and largely staffed by women — developed textiles for sound absorption and light filtering that were genuinely technical products rather than decorative ones.

Why the Bauhaus Closed

The school was under nationalist attack almost from the start, painted as a centre of communist and cosmopolitan intellectualism. Funding cuts drove it out of Weimar in 1925 and out of Dessau in 1932. In 1933, facing sustained Nazi harassment, the Bauhaus was closed — the decision formally taken by its own leadership under that pressure.

The closure is the reason the Bauhaus became global. Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy, the Alberses, Breuer, and many others emigrated, most of them to the United States, where they went on to shape mid-century architecture and design education for another three decades.

The Afterlife of the Movement

• United States. Gropius and Breuer taught at Harvard, Mies van der Rohe led architecture in Chicago, Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus there, and Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College and then Yale.
• Israel. Emigrating architects built thousands of white, flat-roofed modernist buildings in Tel Aviv, a district now inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
• West Germany. The Ulm School of Design revived Bauhaus method after 1953 and, through its work with Braun, fed directly into contemporary product design.
• Everywhere. Glass curtain walls, open-plan interiors, modular housing, grid-based graphic layouts, and sans-serif corporate typography all descend from Bauhaus thinking.

Where to See the Bauhaus in Germany Today

UNESCO inscribed the Bauhaus and its sites in Weimar and Dessau in 1996, adding buildings in Bernau and further Dessau housing in a later extension. The listing recognises that these buildings launched the Modern Movement, and most are open to visitors.

1. Dessau-Roßlau. The Gropius Bauhaus Building, the Masters’ Houses, and the Bauhaus Museum Dessau — the single most rewarding stop, and doable as a day trip from Berlin or Leipzig.
2. Weimar. The former art school building by Henry van de Velde, the Haus am Horn experimental house of 1923, and the Bauhaus Museum Weimar.
3. Bernau bei Berlin. The ADGB Trade Union School, designed under Hannes Meyer and often called the purest built statement of his social programme.
4. Berlin. The Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung holds the world’s largest Bauhaus collection, alongside modernist housing estates across the city.

A practical route: fly into Berlin, spend a day on the Bauhaus-Archiv and the housing estates, take the train to Dessau for the school and Masters’ Houses, then continue to Weimar. Bernau is a short regional-train hop from Berlin and worth a half day if the Meyer years interest you.

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