Celebrating 100 years of Bauhaus
In a nutshell: six sentences that encapsulate the Bauhaus
We run into the Bauhaus more often than we know – and not just while out shopping for furniture. Some of the design school’s maxims have found their way into everyday speech as well.
By Nadine Berghausen
“The ultimate goal of all art is the building!”
All about the building: Walter Gropius, founder and first director of the Bauhaus, knew exactly where he wanted to take his new school. In the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto he wrote: “Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting.” This interdisciplinary approach sought to bring fine art together with the art of architecture, with the spotlight on the building itself.
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Illustration: © Tobias Schrank
“The needs of the people before the need for luxury”
Make way for the architecture of the proletariat! Swiss architect Hannes Meyer took over from Gropius as Bauhaus director. He was critical of his predecessor’s work, and assessed the first phase under Gropius as “sect-like and aesthetic”. Meyer set a new guiding principle to take the school in a different direction: “Basically my teaching will be on absolutely functional-collectivist-constructive lines.” In practice this meant that any object to come out of the Bauhaus had to be designed for inexpensive mass production to make it affordable for everyone.
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Illustration: © Tobias Schrank
“Form follows function”
No ornamentation, no frippery or finery, and no bells and whistles: While the “form follows function” ideal did not originate with the great minds of the Bauhaus – although it is often misattributed to them – they were the first to consistently apply it in Germany. And though the language of the Bauhaus might make it seem like this principle perfectly captures the school’s quintessence, Wassily Kandinsky qualified it somewhat with his dictum, “necessity creates form.”
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Illustration: © Tobias Schrank
“Where there is wool, you’ll find a weaving wench, be it to fill the idle hours at her bench.”
As ahead of its time as the Bauhaus may appear, Gropius quickly demonstrated how little store he really set in the equality between the sexes he initially touted with such enthusiasm. Women were given little to no consideration, as demonstrated by his recommendation to the Council of Masters’ not to undertake “any unnecessary experiments”. At the Bauhaus, emancipation went no further than sending women directly to the weaving workshop whenever possible, and excluding them from any courses in architecture.
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Illustration: © Tobias Schrank
“A thing is defined by its essence”
... Gropius claimed in 1925. So far, so good. “In order to design it so that it functions well, its essence must first be explored; it should serve its purpose perfectly, that is, fulfill its function practically and be durable, inexpensive and ‘beautiful’.” This need to explore the essence of things might help explain many an insane sounding lesson in which students are encouraged to think like the object.
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Illustration: © Tobias Schrank
“Positively unfriendly”
What has architecture come to? The Bauhaus school also came under considerable fire, as reviews of the cool, functional living spaces from the 1923 “Bauhaus Exhibition” showed. Whitewashed steel constructions with innovative interior elements; the walls in the children’s rooms were for writing on, and the furniture could be moved together to save space. Contemporaries did not hold back their harsh derision, using phrases like “North Pole station”, “operating theatre”, referring to the floorplan as an “architectural joke”, and classifying the overall feel as “positively unfriendly, orthodox-puritanical”.
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Illustration: © Tobias Schrank