The Bauhaus Lasted 14 Years and Rewired Design

On April 1, 1919, less than five months after the armistice, Walter Gropius merged two art schools in Weimar into a single new one and called it the Staatliches Bauhaus. Its founding program carried a woodcut of a cathedral by Lyonel Feininger. Fourteen years later the Nazis sealed the doors.

Weimar, 1919

Gropius built the school out of the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, and the merger was the whole idea. Art and craft would stop being separate careers. Every workshop, from ceramics and weaving to carpentry, metal, printing, glass, wall painting and the stage, ran with two heads, a master of works who knew the trade and a master of form who was an artist. Students started with a preliminary course that threw them at raw materials before they were allowed to specialize.

The teaching staff now reads like a museum wall. Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy all taught there. In 1923 the school built the Haus am Horn for its first big exhibition, a model house that is now part of the school's UNESCO listing.

Weimar's politics did not stay friendly. After the 1924 state election, the new conservative government cut the school's funding in half, and a press release dated December 26, 1924, announced that the Bauhaus would close at the end of March 1925.

Dessau and the Glass Box

The city of Dessau took it in. Gropius designed the new building himself, and it became a key text of modern architecture. It officially opened on December 4, 1926, after just over a year of construction. It is an asymmetrical complex of linked wings for workshops, a vocational school, administration, an auditorium and a five-story studio block called the Prellerhaus. The facade uses a glass curtain wall that carries no structural load, a step on from Gropius's earlier Fagus Factory. Most people's mental picture of the Bauhaus is that glass corner.

About 600 meters away, Gropius built the flat-roofed Masters' Houses in 1925 and 1926, a detached director's house for himself and three double houses for the teachers. Feininger and Moholy-Nagy shared one double house, Schlemmer and Georg Muche another, and Kandinsky and Klee a third. That last arrangement deserves a moment. Two of the most important painters of the century lived on either side of a party wall.

In Dessau the emphasis moved from one-off objects toward well-designed products made with industry. Marcel Breuer's tubular steel furniture came out of it, along with Marianne Brandt's metalwork and a line of Bauhaus wallpaper. That shift, from craft object to industrial product, is the thread that runs through every piece of industrial design we cover, from Dieter Rams at Braun to the Eames Lounge Chair.

The Chair That Started With a Bicycle

Breuer was running the cabinet-making workshop when he bought his first bicycle in 1925 and was struck by how light its tubular steel frame was. The club chair he designed over 1925 and 1926, the Bauhaus piece of furniture you are most likely to have sat in, used bent steel tube and straps of Eisengarn, a waxed cotton thread. Margaretha Reichardt, a student in the weaving workshop, improved the thread and developed the cloth and strapping. The design was only possible because Mannesmann had recently perfected a process for making steel tube without a welded seam.

It was not designed for Kandinsky. He admired it, and Breuer made him a copy for his quarters. Thonet produced the chair from the late 1920s as the Model B3, in folding and non-folding versions, and that edition is now the rarest. The name came decades later, when the Italian company Gavina reissued it with black leather in place of fabric. Knoll bought the Gavina Group in 1968 and has made it ever since. The patents have expired, but Knoll owns the Wassily name, which is why reproductions are sold under other names. The Wikipedia entry on the Wassily chair covers the licensing in detail.

Breuer's next idea, the cantilever chair, ended up in court. A German copyright fight over the cantilever principle was eventually settled in favor of the Dutch architect Mart Stam, who is usually credited with the first one.

Closed, Then Everywhere

The school went through directors fast. Gropius resigned in February 1928 and named the architect Hannes Meyer as his successor. Dessau's mayor, Fritz Hesse, dismissed Meyer in the summer of 1930 after students became politically radicalized, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over. On September 30, 1932, a Dessau city council with a National Socialist majority forced the Bauhaus out. Mies moved it into a derelict factory in Berlin-Steglitz and ran it as a private school. In April 1933 the authorities sealed the building, and on August 10, 1933, Mies announced that the Bauhaus was dissolved.

Then it spread. Gropius and Breuer taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Mies went to Chicago to lead architecture at the Armour Institute, and Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus there in 1937. When it folded, the industrialist Walter Paepcke helped back the school that replaced it. Black Mountain College in North Carolina picked up the teaching method. In Tel Aviv, German Jewish emigré architects helped build the White City, more than 4,000 buildings from the 1930s, which UNESCO recognized in 2003.

UNESCO had already listed the Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau in 1996, and in 2017 it extended the listing to the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau and the Laubenganghäuser, the balcony-access apartments in Dessau. The Bauhaus Kooperation makes the point that there was never one consistent Bauhaus style, which is worth remembering every time a flat-pack store slaps the word on a bookcase. The rebellion against all this restraint came later, loudest in Memphis and its plastic laminate, and the Swiss engineering of USM Haller shows how far the systems idea traveled. No school in our design coverage has a longer shadow.

An air raid damaged the Dessau building in 1945 and destroyed the director's house down the road. The chair from Breuer's workshop is still in production, named for a painter it was never designed for.