The Bauhaus & the U.S.

John McKinnon, the executive director of the Elmhurst Art Museum and artist Claudia Weber give first-hand impressions of living with and in a house designed by a master of the Bauhaus.

In 1933, the artist Anni Albers left Germany for the US, where she was invited to teach at at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Of the many places Bauhaus artists flourished after leaving Germany, Harvard University might be the most unexpected – after all, the two schools couldn’t be more different.

After emigrating in 1937, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was able to pursue a second major career in the US as an architect and as a teacher. Remaining active well into old age, he ran an internationally successful firm of architects in Boston and Cambridge: “The Architects Collaborative” – or TAC for short. 

Walter Gropius built the Gropius House as his family home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1938, after he had accepted a teaching position at Harvard Graduate School of Design in Architecture.

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.

Minimalist design, simplicity and efficiency – how the Bauhaus aimed to change the way we live.

Arne Winkelmann, an architecture expert based in Frankfurt am Main, would like to see more a more critical approach to the Bauhaus school: an interview. 

To celebrate the Bauhaus centenary year, 100 photographs from Berlin’s Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung were shown across the USA during 2019 in a traveling exhibition. In this interview, Astrid Bähr and Sibylle Hoiman, both of whom worked on the exhibition, give an initial insight.