The history of Bauhaus

"Let us together desire, conceive and create the new building of the future, which will combine everything - architecture and sculpture and painting - in a single form which will one day rise towards the heaver from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.
Let us create a new guilt of craftsman, without the class-distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist."

Part of the manifesto accompanying the programme of the new school, by Walter Gropius. A new school that was established in Weimar, Germany in April 1919 under Gropius' directorship. It was formed by combining the existing Weimar Academy of fine arts and the School of Arts and Crafts. Its aim was to train students in both the theory and the practice of the arts, to enable them to create products that were both artistic and commercial. The school had to "rescue all of the arts from the isolation in which each then found the isolation in which each then found itself" and to encourage the individual artisans and craftsmen to work cooperatively and combine all of their skills. Students had to elevate the status of crafts, chairs, lamps, teapots e.t.c to the same level enjoyed by fine arts, painting, sculpting e.t.c.
On one level the Bauhaus was intended to make artists, designers and architects more socially responsible. On another level it aspired to nothing less than the improvement of the cultural life of the nation and to the betterment of society.

Gropius gathered together an extraordinary group of artists - teachers for the new school.' We must not start with mediocrity' he explained. It is our duty to enlist powerful famous personalities whenever possible, even if we do not yet fully understand them". Between 1912 and 1922 he hired Feininger, Swiss painters Johannes Itten and Paul Klee the Germans Gerhard Marks and Lothar Schreyer and the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky.

Itten developed the celebrated Preliminary Course which was compulsory for all students. It was designed to rid students of pre-conceived classical notions of art training and to unlock their creative potential. The course included studies in materials, tool and colours theory, analysis of the pictorial structure of Old Masters, meditation and breathing exercises. The most important theoretical courses were those on colour and form taught by Kandisky and Klee. The students who successfully completed the preliminary Course, moved on to workshops where they were taught by an artist and a trained craftsman. Although the variety of workshops it had at this stage Bauhaus still lacked an architecture department.

Despite these, little headway had been made towards a closer working relationship with outside industry. Art had been fused with craft, but not with industry. For the Bauhaus to flourish, the artist would have to transform himself from expressionist, mystical visionary to Constructivist engineer- technician. After a brief struggle Itten resigned in 1923 to be replaced by the Hungarian Lazzlo Moholy-Nagy whose work and ideas reflected his link with Hungarian Activism, De Stijl and constructivism. Moholy-Nagy started encouraging the students to take a more practical approach to their work, experimenting with new techniques and new media. He also changed the output of the metal workshop from one-off, Handmade crafts objects to practical designs of prototypes for industry.

In 1923 the change of policy was made clear by the title of Gropius's public address, ‘Art and Technology - A new Unity'. A highlight of the exhibition itself was the experimental House designed by Muche and Meyer, a prototype of functional, cheap, mass produced housing constructed using the latest materials and furnished with custom - designed carpets, radiators, tiles, lights, kitchen and furniture made in Bauhaus workshops.
In 1925 the nationalist majority in the Weimar government withdrew the school's funding. In the same year the school moved to socialist Dessau, where it was given the recourses to built specially designed buildings for the school, students and stuff. Following the schools relocation to Dessau, Gropius hoped that the Bauhaus would finally be able to focus on architecture. Another important development in Dessau was the hiring of six former students as full time techers:Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Gunta Stolzl, Hinnerk Scheper , Joost Schmidt and Alders. The work produced in their workshops and in the new architecture department, established in 1927 under the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, created a new Bauhaus design, characterized by simplicity, refinement of line shape, geometric abstraction, primary colours and the use of new materials and technologies. Examples include Bayer's lower case san-serif type, used as the house style, Beuer's tubular steel furniture, and the social housing project undertaken by the architecture department at Dessau-Torten. In 1928 Gropius resigned and returned to his private practice. Although he appointed Meyer as his successor Mayer's uncompromisingly left-wing agenda did not endear him to his colleagues. Moholy-Nagy, Breuer and Bayer all resigned complaining that community spirit had been replaced by individual competition. Thereafter, the school developed into a vocational institution for the training of architects and industrial designers. New courses were added, including town planning and photography.

Under Meyer's directorship the school became a commercial success for the first time in its history. Korting and Mathiesen began manufacturing lamps designed in the metal workshop led by Mariane Brandt a former student at the school. Wallpaper designed in the mural workshop also went into production and the weaving, furniture and advertising workshops were succeddful in obtaining outside commissions. Meyer's Marxist politics soon alienated him from the local government and he was forced to resign in 1930, to be replaced by architect Ludwing Mies van der Rohe.

With the factory of the National Socialists in the 1931 local elections the school was accused of being too cosmopolitan and not sufficiently ‘German@ and in 1932, its grant was cancelled. A last attempt was made to save the school by moving it to Berlin as a private institution. This only lasted until April 1933 when the Nazis finally closed it down, declaring that it was ‘one of the most obvious refuges of the Jewish-Marxist conception of ‘art'.

The Bauhaus as an institution came to an end in 1933 but the Bauhaus as an idea gained momentum. It became a concept, indeed a catchphrase all over the world. The respect which it commands is associated above all with the design it pioneered, one which we now describe - with inadmissible simples - as ‘Bauhaus style'.