The Bauhaus and the Birth of Modern Design

Few schools have shaped the look of the modern world as profoundly as the Bauhaus, an institution of art, craft and design that operated in Germany for little more than a decade in the early twentieth century. Although it existed for a short time and was closed under political pressure, the ideas it developed spread across the world and continue to influence the design of buildings, furniture and everyday objects nearly a hundred years later. The school gave its name to a whole approach to design characterised by simplicity, function and a rejection of unnecessary ornament.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, who brought together the teaching of fine art and practical craft under a single roof. In the years before the school opened, art and craft had often been regarded as separate and unequal pursuits, with the fine artist enjoying higher status than the humble craftsman. Gropius rejected this division. He argued that there should be no fundamental difference between the artist and the craftsman, and that the two should be trained together so that beautiful design and skilled making could be reunited.

A distinctive feature of the school was the way its students were taught. Rather than beginning with the copying of old masters, newcomers took a preliminary course in which they explored materials, colour and form directly, learning through experiment and their own hands. After this foundation, students worked in a series of workshops devoted to particular materials and techniques, such as metal, wood, textiles and, later, wall painting. In these workshops they were typically guided by two teachers at once: an artist concerned with form, and an experienced craftsman concerned with technique.

The philosophy that emerged from this teaching placed great emphasis on function. Designers associated with the Bauhaus believed that the form of an object should follow from its purpose, and that decoration added merely for its own sake was dishonest and wasteful. A chair, a lamp or a building should be shaped by what it needed to do and by the nature of the materials from which it was made. This led to a preference for clean lines, plain surfaces and simple geometric shapes, an aesthetic that came to seem strikingly modern.

The Bauhaus also embraced the machine, at a time when many artists distrusted industrial production. Rather than lamenting the rise of the factory, its designers sought to create objects that could be manufactured in large numbers by machine while still being well designed. They produced prototypes for items such as tubular steel chairs, lamps and household goods that were intended not as unique handmade pieces but as models for mass production. In this way good design could, in principle, be made available to ordinary people rather than only to the wealthy.

The school did not remain in one place. It was originally established in the city of Weimar, but political hostility forced it to move to Dessau, where a famous new building designed by Gropius himself became a showcase for the school's ideas, with its glass walls and unadorned forms. Later the institution moved again, to Berlin, as conditions in Germany grew increasingly difficult. Throughout these moves the leadership of the school changed hands, passing from Gropius to later directors who continued to develop its work in different directions.

In 1933 the Bauhaus was closed for good under pressure from the new political regime, which regarded its modern outlook with suspicion. Yet the closure did not end its influence; if anything, it spread the school's ideas more widely. Many of the teachers and students left Germany and settled in other countries, carrying the principles of the Bauhaus with them. Several went on to teach and practise abroad, where they helped to shape modern architecture and design education far beyond the country of the school's birth.

The legacy of the Bauhaus is visible today in countless buildings of steel and glass, in furniture of simple geometric form, and in the very idea that everyday objects deserve careful and thoughtful design. Its insistence that beauty and usefulness belong together, and that good design should serve ordinary life, has become so widely accepted that it is easy to forget how radical it once seemed. For an institution that lasted only fourteen years, its impact on the modern world has been extraordinary.