Bauhaus and modernist architecture

On April 1, 1919, the architect Walter Gropius opened the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, by merging a fine arts academy with a school of arts and crafts. Its founding manifesto called for architects, painters and craftsmen to work together and build for modern life, and its teachers included the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Students learned in workshops, such as metalwork, weaving, wood and typography, and then designed objects for industrial production: tubular steel chairs, lamps, clean sans-serif posters and houses with flat roofs and no ornament.¹²

Germany was in turmoil after defeat in World War I, and artists wanted to rebuild society from the ground up. The tools were also at hand: steel, reinforced concrete and large sheets of plate glass, made affordable by the industrial revolution and by the Bessemer steel process, had already allowed skyscrapers in Chicago and New York. Gropius argued that design should start from use and that mass production could bring good design to ordinary people. Political pressure pushed the school from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed its famous glass-walled building, and then to Berlin. The Nazis forced it to close in 1933.¹²

Its teachers and students scattered, and the movement spread as a result. Gropius went to Harvard and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school's last director, to Chicago, where he designed towers of steel and glass. The 1932 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art named their approach the International Style. After World War II it dominated office towers, housing blocks and public buildings, from the Seagram Building in New York to schools and hospitals everywhere. Critics later attacked the style as cold and uniform, but its ideas about functional design still shape architecture, furniture and graphic design.²