Bauhaus

For many Americans the International Style in modern architecture is synony­mous with the Bauhaus (building house), the influential German school of art, archi­tecture, and design.

The Bauhaus’s roots can be traced to currents in design during the German Em­pire (1871-1918) and the young architect Walter Gropius’s concern for design’s fate in an industrial mass society. A member of the German Werkbund, an organization of designers, industrialists, and educators founded in 1908, Gropius shared its con­cern with the inadequacy for modern needs of traditional fine arts training of artists and architects, as well as the apprenticeship and trade school systems in the applied arts. Inspired by fellow Werkbund member Henry van de Velde, who in turn based his ideas on the arts and crafts philosophy of William Morris, Gropius began to plan a school curriculum that erased distinctions between “fine” and “applied” art. It was based on a philosophy of design education that would identify basic laws of form and fitness for use. The resulting products, Gropius believed, would meet modern needs both practically and spiritually, as they healed the schism between the artist and the ordinary citizen.

By the time he founded the Staatliches Bauhaus (supported by the state of Thuringia) in Weimar in 1919, Gropius, shocked by his experience in World War I, had retreated from his prewar embrace of industrial civilization. He established the school on a handicraft- rather than an industrial-training basis, and its dominant mood was that of a utopian colony divorced from the world. The institute’s Vorkurs (Basic Course) was taught at first by painters identified with the antimodern Expression­ist movement, with the Swiss Johannes Itten as the leading figure and Wassily Kandinsky, a founder of abstract painting, among the staff (The German American painter Ly- onel Feininger, although always essentially detached from the school’s practical educa­tion, was part of this initial cadre.) Gropius hoped that the investigations into pure form pursued by radical painters would lead to a new basis for design thinking in architecture and applied design, replacing the imitation of classical or Gothic prototypes. The idea of a new beginning in society as well as art was paramount.

It has been suggested that Itten’s phi­losophy of creating form out of the tasks and inspirations of the moment borrowed from American pragmatist John Dewey’s philosophy of education as learning through experience instead of memorizing a “correct” curriculum. Itten encouraged students to find laws of basic design, for­mal and practical, through free experiment with scrap material and exercises with col­ors and patterns. Itten’s Expressionist anti­modernism and mysticism pushed the school’s meager output toward a rough, heavy, vaguely cubist-influenced style.

The Bauhaus took its mature direction in 1922—1923. Many students, and then Gropius himself, were swayed by the pro­machine arguments, backed up by striking designs, of the Dutch De Stijl movement and the Russian constructivists. Deciding that only by embracing the machine and the forms most in tune with its processes could the school help society, Gropius pro­claimed, “Art and Technology—A New Unity.” The Hungarian-born constructivist painter Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, an un­abashed enthusiast for the machine, re­placed Itten in 1923 as director of the Vorkurs.

During the Bauhaus’s peak period of 1925—1928, when the school relocated to Gropius’s striking white-cubic building complex in Dessau—with its soon-to-be- famous glass-walled workshop wing—the school’s credo was a creative process with­out preconceptions. However, the Bauhaus quickly became identified (not entirely unfairly, since Gropius had pushed the school to find a universal grammar of de­sign) with a style of smooth horizontals, white or glass cubistic forms accented with primary colors, clean sans-serif or lower­case graphics, and the air of machine func­tionality. In addition, for many students and some faculty, Americanization was a powerfully attractive ideal that steered them away from art and toward bold prac­ticality. As an architect, Gropius thought of himself as a creative experimenter with standardized industrial modules, like Henry Ford with the Model T, and is al­leged to have solicited Ford (unsuccess­fully) for support. More generally, if nebu­lously, America’s supposed spirit of engagement with the present, its bold em­brace of the machine age and spurning of the past, inspired many at the school. American-style jazz was popular among students, and one student declared in the school magazine that Ford and Edison were honorary Bauhausler (along with Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein).

By this time, however, Gropius had stepped down as the Bauhaus’s director. Under his successor, Hannes Meyer, the politically engaged functionalist who had headed the school’s architecture depart­ment, the school’s americanism intensified. However, the school’s pursuit of free cre­ativity waned, a consequence of Meyer’s in­sistence on practical design that would serve the industrial masses. Student spirit for engaging with society ran high, but dis­satisfaction among those who still valued the fine arts and a fear that the school’s po­litical engagement endangered it led to Meyer’s replacement by the apolitical, mag­isterial Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930. Mies ran the school as an architectural at­elier, with only Kandinsky and Albers re­maining from the Gropius era, until Nazi elements in the Dessau city government forced the school’s closure in early 1932. Mies reopened it in Berlin as a private school, but the Nazis sealed its building under suspicion of Communist activities soon after Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power. Rather than accept Nazi demands to alter the curriculum, Mies chose to disband the institution in the summer of 1933.

The Bauhaus had attracted a few American students, beginning with artist Florence Henri in the late 1920s, but for the most part the American presence was limited to male architecture students in the final years under Mies. American avant- garde “little magazines” occasionally spot­lighted Bauhaus architectural designs along with other European modernist manifesta­tions, and architectural journals described the “extreme functionalism” of Gropius’s architecture, ignoring the rest of the cur­riculum. Significant American attention to the school began in 1927, when the young Harvard-trained art historian Alfred Barr toured the school and met Gropius. Barr’s preoccupation with finding a unified style for all the arts in the machine age seemed to him to have been triumphantly met in Gropius’s school.

After Hitler’s seizure of power, Barr’s efforts and those of MOMA’s architecture curator Philip Cortelyou Johnson (a devo­tee of Mies) secured teaching positions for Bauhaus alumni in the United States. Al­bers found a position teaching art at the experimental Black Mountain College (1933). Chicago industrialists brought over Moholy-Nagy as head of a New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937), soon reorganized as the School of Design. Barr and architectural educator Joseph Hudnut secured Gropius’s appointment as director of the architecture curriculum at Harvard University (1936— 1937). Alumni designers Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Alexander (Xanti) Schawin- sky, Herbert Matter, and Mies soon fol­lowed. Even though MOMA’s 1938 show on the Gropius years of the Bauhaus was a critical and popular failure, it helped ce­ment a growing idea that functionalist ar­chitecture, modernist commercial design, and geometric abstract art were all synony­mous with the Bauhaus.

Renewed contact between the former Bauhausler in optimistic circumstances led to new creativity for many, notably in Breuer’s imaginative output of small coun­try houses (in practice with Gropius) and Bayer’s exhibition designs for MOMA and advertisements for the Container Corpora­tion of America (CCA). The Swiss art his­torian Sigfried Giedion’s book Space, Time, and Architecture (1941), based on lectures he had given at Harvard at Gropius’s invi­tation, was influential in cementing the Bauhaus approach as the cornerstone of modern architecture. (Mies and his most loyal Bauhaus faculty, especially Walter Pe-

Chicago Bauhaus School—in the former home of Marshall Field.

terhans and planner-architect Ludwig Hilberseimer, tended not to associate with the Gropius group.)

The post—World War II years saw both triumph for and growing criticism of the Bauhaus influence in the United States. Gropius uprooted the Beaux-Arts curricu­lum from Harvard but was unable to intro­duce the complete Bauhaus Vorkurs cur­riculum. His approach, which influenced all departments of the Graduate School of Design, stressed an unprejudiced approach to problems of architecture as a social envi­ronment. In practice, this meant planning exercises that stressed urban decentraliza­tion and an approach to building design that turned functional elements into bold formal patterns. Marcel Breuer emerged as the dominant teacher of architecture in the school. Although graduates like I. M. Pei and the Australian Harry Seidler adopted much from his form language, Paul Rudolph and Philip Cortelyou Johnson (who had chosen architectural practice over historical scholarship) increasingly took their own paths. So did Mies, directing the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with the steel industrial frame. Moholy-Nagy proved more successful as an inspiring spirit than director of a school, al­though his impact on younger designers like Charles Eames and Paul Rand was con­siderable. The elan of the Bauhaus years survived most undiluted at Black Mountain College, where Gropius, Moholy, and other alumni were frequent visitors to Albers’s courses and to the school’s famous Summer Institute. The school had no architecture or design curriculum, however, and by the late 1940s was increasingly under the influence of writers and teachers of literature.

Albers became head of Yale’s fine art curriculum in 1950 and successfully di­rected its path toward abstract art until 1970. His wife Anni, an important mem­ber of the Bauhaus community, gained re­spect as a leading textile artist. Throughout this period an American Bauhaus style of lightweight planes in bright, simple, pri­mary-colored forms, playful yet machined, could be felt in the best American com­mercial design until the 1970s, epitomized by Herbert Bayer’s work for CCA and At­lantic Richfield.

Unfortunately, Americans who picked up Bauhaus forms and methods often ig­nored the idealism (social and philosophi­cal) behind them and began to equate Bauhaus style with either blank utility or a formalism of abstract geometry. It might be said that Gropius’s decision in the early Weimar days to drop the study of past de­sign, as a drag on individual creativity and an irrelevance to modern conditions, en­couraged a reaction toward a more histori­cally rooted (or at least more familiar­looking) forms. The use of apparently Bauhaus-influenced forms in the much- reviled megaprojects of late modernism, such as Wallace Harrison’s New York State governmental complex in Albany, discred­ited (however unfairly and uncomprehend- ingly) Gropius’s philosophy of “total de­sign.” By the time Gropius and Mies died in 1969, a looser, more ironic, and histori­cist pluralism, often casting the Bauhaus as its enemy, had begun to push aside the Bauhaus ideals of learning through doing and exploring the fundamentals of design.

Miles David Samson

See also Americanization; Einstein, Albert; Ford, Henry; Gropius, Walter Adolph; Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig

References and Further Reading

Allen, James Sloan. The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Alofsin, Anthony. The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Harris, Mary Emma. The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.

Kentgens-Craig, Margret. The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919—1936. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Naylor, Gillian. The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985.

Wingler, Hans M. Bauhaus in Amerika: Resonanz und Weiterentwicklung. Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1972.

Wingler, Hans M., ed. The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.