Bauhaus
Typography by Herbert Bayer above the en-
trance to the workshop block of the Bauhaus,
Dessau, 2005.
Bauhaus ("House of Building" or "Building
School") is the common term for the Staat-
liches Bauhaus , a school in Germany that
combined crafts and the fine arts, and was
famous for the approach to design that it
publicized and taught. It operated from 1919
to 1933.
The Bauhaus school was founded by Wal-
ter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name,
and the fact that its founder was an architect,
the Bauhaus did not have an architecture de-
partment during the first years of its exist-
ence. The Bauhaus style became one of the
most influential currents in Modernist archi-
tecture and modern design.[1] The Bauhaus
had a profound influence upon subsequent
developments in art, architecture, graphic
design, interior design, industrial design, and
typography.
The school existed in three German cities
(Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from
1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933),
under
three different architect-directors:
Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Hannes
Meyer from 1927 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933, when the
school was closed by the Nazi regime.
The changes of venue and leadership res-
ulted in a constant shifting of focus, tech-
nique, instructors, and politics. When the
school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for in-
stance, although it had been an important
revenue source,
the pottery shop was
discontinued. When Mies van der Rohe took
over the school in 1930, he transformed it in-
to a private school, and would not allow any
supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.
Bauhaus and German
modernism
For more details on this topic, see New Ob-
jectivity (architecture).
The Bauhaus
Defeat in World War I, the fall of the German
monarchy and the abolition of censorship un-
der the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed
an upsurge of radical experimentation in all
the arts, previously suppressed by the old re-
gime. Many Germans of left-wing views were
influenced by the cultural experimentat