Bauhaus
The School, Its Teachers, and a Century of Design
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The book traces the Bauhaus's architectural output and lasting impact on design. It examines the "White City" concept and the Soviet influence in Zaporizhzhia. The work covers the school's centenary celebrations and its role in the New European Bauhaus movement that continues today.
Anyone interested in how a single school shaped modern architecture and design will find this comprehensive overview essential reading.
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The Bauhaus style is defined by simple geometric shapes—rectangles, spheres—and a rejection of fancy decoration. Buildings, furniture, and even fonts often show rounded corners, curved walls, or chrome pipes. Some structures feature rectangular elements like balconies with flat railings and long rows of windows. These designs aim to create ideal forms, using outlines as tools to achieve that goal. The approach focused on clean lines and functional beauty, shaping not just architecture but also the way we think about design today.
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After Germany's defeat in World War I and the creation of the Weimar Republic, a new liberal energy sparked bold experimentation across the arts, which had been silenced under the old order. Influenced by the Russian Revolution and movements like constructivism, many left-leaning Germans embraced these cultural shifts, though Walter Gropius, who founded Bauhaus, insisted the school was completely apolitical. Equally shaping its direction was William Morris, the 19th-century English designer who believed art should serve society and that form and function must align. These ideas helped define what became known as the International Style — a design approach marked by clean lines, no ornamentation, and a harmony between how objects or buildings looked and what they were meant to do.
The Bauhaus was deeply shaped by modernism, a cultural shift that began as early as the 1880s and was already present in Germany before World War I, even amid prevailing conservatism. Many of the design ideas later linked to Gropius and the school—like simplified forms, functionality, and the belief that mass production could coexist with individual artistic vision—were already being explored in Germany. In 1907, Hermann Muthesius founded the Deutscher Werkbund to navigate the challenges of mass production while keeping Germany economically competitive with England. By 1914, this group had become the leading voice on design in Germany, with 1,870 members debating key issues like the role of beauty in everyday objects and whether one correct form could exist.
In June 1907, Peter Behrens started his influential work with the German electrical company AEG, where he merged art and mass production in industrial design. He crafted consumer goods, standardized components, and designed clean-line graphics for the firm. Behrens also built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory and made extensive use of new materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel. A founding member of the Werkbund, he was succeeded in his influence by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, who both worked under him during this period.
The Bauhaus opened in 1919 as Germany’s artistic climate shifted from Expressionism to a more restrained, functional style known as New Objectivity. Architects like Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, and Hans Poelzig moved away from imaginative design toward buildings that were rational, practical, and sometimes standardized. This modernist approach wasn’t limited to the Bauhaus—other German-speaking architects of the 1920s engaged with similar ideas. The new Weimar Constitution included a promise to ensure healthy housing for all Germans, which inspired projects like those by Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner in cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt. Public campaigns, exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, and even films helped bring modernist design into daily life, sparking both support and controversy.
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The Vkhutemas was a Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, and it’s often compared to the Bauhaus. Though founded a year after the Bauhaus school, Vkhutemas shares close parallels with it in purpose, structure, and goals. Both were the first to train artist-designers in a modern way, combining traditional craft with modern technology. They offered similar programs, including basic courses in aesthetic principles, color theory, industrial design, and architecture. Vkhutemas was larger than the Bauhaus, but it received less attention outside the Soviet Union, making it less known in the West.
The shared vision of modern design drew the Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus together through active exchanges. Hannes Meyer, who led the Bauhaus after its founder Walter Gropius, sought to build connections between the two institutions. Meanwhile, Hinnerk Scheper from the Bauhaus collaborated with colleagues at Vkhutein on exploring color in architectural work. In 1930, a German edition of Russia: an Architecture for World Revolution by El Lissitzky featured images of projects from both Vkhutemas and Vkhutein.
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In Weimar, on 1 April 1919, Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus, merging the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art with the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts to form a new architecture department. The school's origins traced back to 1906, when the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach founded an arts and crafts institution led by Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. After van de Velde resigned in 1915 due to his nationality, he recommended Gropius, Hermann Obrist, and August Endell as potential successors. Delays from World War I and debates over the role of fine and applied arts finally led to Gropius taking the helm. In a pamphlet for the Exhibition of Unknown Architects in April 1919, he declared his vision: "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." The name Bauhaus came from Bauhütte, a medieval stonemasons' guild. The original faculty included Gropius, Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, and Gerhard Marcks. By 1920, Oskar Schlemmer joined the theatre workshop, and in 1922, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were added. The Bauhaus's first major project, the Sommerfeld House, was completed between 1920 and 1921. That same year, 1922, saw Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg arrive to promote De Stijl, and Russian artist El Lissitzky visited the school.
From 1919 to 1922, the Bauhaus was shaped by Johannes Itten, who taught the Vorkurs or "preliminary course" that introduced students to the school's ideas. Itten drew from Franz Cižek and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel in his teaching and was influenced aesthetically by the Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich and Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. This German Expressionist influence led to the addition of Wassily Kandinsky, a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, to the faculty. Itten resigned in late 1923, and was replaced by László Moholy-Nagy, who restructured the Vorkurs with a focus on the New Objectivity favored by Gropius. This shift reflected broader socio-economic trends that had been developing since at least 1907, when Henry van de Velde argued for a craft-based approach to design and Hermann Muthesius began using industrial prototypes.
Gropius wasn't opposed to Expressionism, and in his 1919 pamphlet he described "painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen," calling it "the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future." By 1923, though, he had moved on from evoking Romanesque cathedrals and the Völkisch movement's craft-driven aesthetic. Instead, he declared, "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars." He believed a new era had begun after the war, one that demanded a new architectural style—functional, affordable, and suited to mass production. To that end, Gropius sought to merge art and craft into high-quality, functional designs with artistic value. The Bauhaus published a magazine called Bauhaus and a series of books titled Bauhausbücher. Because the Weimar Republic lacked raw materials like those in the United States or Great Britain, it had to depend on skilled labor and exporting innovative goods. That meant designers were essential—and so was a new kind of art education. The school's philosophy insisted that artists should be trained to work with industry.
Weimar was in the German state of Thuringia, where the Bauhaus school received support from the Social Democrat-controlled government. The school faced growing political pressure from conservative groups after 1923, and as part of a new condition, it had to hold an exhibition. That happened in 1923 with the Haus am Horn. By 1924, the Social Democrats lost their majority in state elections. The new conservative Ministry of Education cut funding in half, placed staff on six-month contracts, and issued a press release on 26 December 1924 announcing closure by the end of March 1925. At that time, the school had already begun seeking alternative funding. After moving to Dessau, the Bauhaus found a new environment with less political hostility.
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The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, and its new facilities were officially opened late in 1926. Gropius designed the buildings with a futuristic vision, drawing more on the style of his earlier work for the Fagus Factory than on the plain Neo-classical approach seen in the Werkbund pavilion or the Völkisch Sommerfeld House. During the Dessau period, the school took a notable turn in direction. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius first asked the Dutch architect Mart Stam to lead the architecture program, but when Stam turned down the offer, Gropius chose Hannes Meyer instead—Meyer being Stam’s friend and colleague from the ABC group.
When Gropius resigned in February 1928, Meyer took over as director of the Bauhaus, and under his leadership the school secured two major building commissions that still stand today. These included five apartment buildings in Dessau and the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, or ADGB Trade Union School, in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer liked to present his ideas using precise measurements and calculations, and he preferred using standard, off-the-shelf materials to keep costs down. This practical approach appealed to clients, and the school made its first profit in 1929.
Walter Gropius stepped down from the Bauhaus in 1930, succeeded by Hannes Meyer who brought a more radical approach. As a radical functionalist, he pushed the school further left politically and forced several long-time instructors to resign, including Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer. Though he didn't want the school to become a tool of party politics, he blocked the formation of a student communist cell, making him a target in the tense political climate. In the summer of 1930, Dessau mayor Fritz Hesse fired him. The city council then asked Gropius to return, but he recommended Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who took over that same year. Mies interviewed every student and dismissed those he considered uncommitted. He stopped the school's production of goods so it could focus on teaching, and only appointed Lilly Reich, his close confidant, as new faculty. By 1931, the Nazi Party had gained control of the Dessau city council, and in 1932, they moved to shut down the school—only four Communists and Hesse opposed the closure.
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In late 1932, Mies rented a derelict factory on Birkbusch Street 49 in Berlin with his own money to house the Bauhaus. The students and faculty worked together to rehabilitate the space, painting the interior white. The school operated for ten months without interference from the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Gestapo shut it down. Mies protested the decision and spoke directly to the head of the Gestapo, who agreed to let the school reopen. But shortly after receiving a letter permitting the opening, Mies and the faculty chose to close the Bauhaus voluntarily.
Although the Nazi Party didn’t have a clear architectural plan before 1933, writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had already called the Bauhaus "un-German" and attacked its modernist designs, using flat roofs as a point of public controversy. By the early 1930s, they increasingly portrayed the school as a front for communists and social liberals. When Ludwig Meyer was fired in 1930, some of his communist students stayed loyal and moved to the Soviet Union.
The Nazi movement denounced the Bauhaus from nearly the start, calling its work "degenerate art" and targeting what it saw as foreign, possibly Jewish influences in "cosmopolitan modernism." Even before the Nazis fully seized power, pressure on the school had mounted. Although Gropius insisted that his service in the war and loyalty to the country meant his efforts were not politically subversive, the Berlin Bauhaus was forced to shut down in April 1933.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, about twenty Bauhauslers are known to have been killed in prison or concentration camps. Some emigrated, while others adapted and took part in propaganda exhibitions and design fairs. They created photographic and graphic works like magazine covers and movie posters, and also designed furniture, carpets, household objects, and even busts of Hitler. Of the 119 teaching staff, around fifteen left between 1933 and 1938. Of the roughly 1,250 students enrolled at that time, about 900 stayed in Germany. Among them, 188 joined the National Socialist Party—170 men and 18 women—while 14 were part of the brown shirts, 12 joined the SS, and one was involved in the design of the crematoria at Auschwitz.
Mies van der Rohe moved to the United States to become director of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago and to look for building projects. Though the plain, function-first style of modernism didn’t take root in Nazi Germany, some Bauhaus ideas did survive. When Hitler’s chief engineer, Fritz Todt, started building autobahns in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations showed bold modernist designs. Mies submitted plans for some of these projects. Still, emigrants carried Bauhaus ideas overseas, helping establish a “New Bauhaus” in Chicago.
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The early Bauhaus faced a clear contradiction: while its manifesto said all creative work should lead to building, architecture classes didn’t start until 1927. During Gropius’s time at the school from 1919 to 1927, he and his partner Adolf Meyer didn’t see much difference between what the school produced and what their architectural office did. The actual built work from those years was mostly Gropius’s—like the Sommerfeld house in Berlin, the Otte house also in Berlin, the Auerbach house in Jena, and a design for the Chicago Tribune Tower that brought the school fame. The 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau is also credited to him. Aside from student contributions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, most of their architectural efforts were unrealized projects, interior designs, or crafts such as cabinets, chairs, and pottery.
Under Meyer’s leadership, the school redirected its architectural efforts from style to function over the next two years. He took on major projects, including five "Laubenganghäuser" for the city of Dessau—apartment buildings with balcony access that remain in use today. Another key commission was the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, or ADGB Trade Union School, in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer approached design by studying user needs and developing solutions scientifically. He emphasized Gropius’s method of Wesensforschung, which focused on analyzing an object's essential properties to determine its use value. Gropius believed that universal, standardized designs could be created to serve broad purposes.
Mies van der Rohe rejected Meyer's political views, his supporters, and his approach to architecture. While Gropius focused on "study of essentials" and Meyer emphasized research into user needs, Mies promoted a "spatial implementation of intellectual decisions," essentially favoring his own aesthetic vision. Neither Mies van der Rohe nor his Bauhaus students saw any of their architectural projects realized during the 1930s.
The Bauhaus movement wasn’t focused on worker housing, though only two of its projects—like the apartment building in Dessau and the Törten row housing—fell into that category. The real pioneers of socially progressive housing in Weimar Germany were Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, and especially Ernst May, who served as city architects in Berlin, Dresden, and Frankfurt. Taut’s housing in south-west Berlin, near the U-Bahn stop Onkel Toms Hütte, built during the 1920s, is still occupied today.
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The Bauhaus school left a deep mark on art and architecture across Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and Israel after it closed, because many of its artists and teachers had to flee or were forced out by the Nazi regime. In 1996, four key locations connected to the Bauhaus in Germany were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, and two more were included in 2017.
In 1928, Hungarian painter Alexander Bortnyik opened a design school in Budapest called Műhely, meaning "the studio." Located on the seventh floor of a Nagymezo Street house, it was intended to mirror the Bauhaus. Bortnyik looked up to László Moholy-Nagy, who taught there. Victor Vasarely, later a pioneer of op art, studied at Műhely before relocating to Paris in 1930.
Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy regrouped in Britain during the mid-1930s, settling in the Isokon housing development on Lawn Road in London. Before the war disrupted their work, they moved on—Gropius and Breuer eventually ending up at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. There, they worked together on projects including the Alan I. W. Frank House in Pittsburgh and a building in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. The Harvard School left a strong mark on American architecture during the late 1920s and early 1930s, shaping the careers of students like Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin, and Paul Rudolph.
In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe settled in Chicago and became one of the world's leading architects, thanks to Philip Johnson's support. Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school, later known as the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, with help from industrialist Walter Paepcke. Werner Drewes brought the Bauhaus style to America, teaching at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Herbert Bayer, supported by Paepcke, went to Aspen, Colorado, to work on projects for the Aspen Institute. In 1953, Max Bill, along with Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher, started the Ulm School of Design in Germany, continuing the Bauhaus tradition. The school included semiotics in its curriculum and influenced design education globally, even after it closed in 1968. The Bauhaus typefaces developed at Ulm also shaped typography for decades afterward.
The Bauhaus reshaped design education by blending art, craft, and technology in its curriculum. Its Vorkurs, or preliminary course, combined theoretical learning with practical experimentation, teaching students colour theory, design principles, and material exploration. This approach spread internationally. In Australia, the Shillito Design School, founded in 1962 and closed in 1980 by Phyllis Shillito, mirrored this structure. She believed that mastering fundamentals allowed students to design anything from dresses to stoves. In Britain, painter and teacher William Johnstone helped bring Bauhaus ideas into art schools, leading to the adoption of a course called Basic Design. By the early 1960s, it had become standard across all art schools in the country.
The Bauhaus made a major impact on modern furniture design, with Marcel Breuer creating iconic pieces like the Cantilever chair and Wassily Chair. Breuer later faced a legal battle in Germany over patent rights to the cantilever design, disputing with Dutch architect Mart Stam. Although Stam had worked on the 1923 Bauhaus exhibit in Weimar and later guest-lectured at the school, he was not formally part of it. He and Breuer had each developed the cantilever concept independently, leading to the conflict. Despite this, the most profitable product to come out of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.
After World War II, the Bauhaus building in Dessau stayed standing and was used by the German Democratic Republic as a design school, keeping some architectural functions and even hosting live theater productions under the name Bauhausbühne. Following German reunification, a new version of the school took over the same building, though it had no real connection to the original Bauhaus led by Gropius in the 1920s. In 1979, the Bauhaus-Dessau College began offering postgraduate programs open to students from around the world. This effort was supported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation, which had been established in 1974 as a public institution.
The Bauhaus school's legacy has been reassessed over time, with critics pointing out that its design philosophy overlooked important human needs. Some have described the movement as a projection of utopia marked by mechanistic views, highlighting how its ideals, while bold, did not fully account for the complexities of everyday life. This critical perspective emerged from a broader examination of the school's impact, one that questioned how well its principles translated into real-world applications. The school had hoped to merge art and industry, yet later analysis suggested it failed to consider key emotional and social aspects of design. These shortcomings shaped how people understood the influence of the Bauhaus for generations to come.
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The White City, or העיר הלבנה in Hebrew, refers to more than 4,000 buildings in Tel Aviv constructed in the 1930s in the Bauhaus or International Style. These structures were created by German Jewish architects who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe. The city now contains the world’s largest concentration of this architectural approach. In 2003, UNESCO designated the area a World Cultural Heritage site, praising its role as an exceptional example of early 20th-century urban planning and architecture. The recognition highlighted how modern design was adapted to local climate and cultural conditions. Today, the Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv offers guided tours, and the Bauhaus Foundation presents exhibits on this distinctive style.
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In the 1930s, a neighborhood called Sotsmisto was built in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. It was part of a larger plan to modernize an industrial city, and it showed how Bauhaus ideas shaped early Soviet architecture. This residential area was among the first of its kind in the USSR, reflecting the influence of Bauhaus principles on design and urban planning during that time.
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In 2019, as the centenary of the Bauhaus school was being celebrated worldwide, events and exhibitions took place around the world. The international opening festival at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, held from January 16 to 24, focused on contemporary artists whose work continued to reflect the aesthetic and experimental spirit of the Bauhaus. A major exhibition titled Original Bauhaus, The Centenary Exhibition ran at the Berlinische Galerie from September 6, 2019, to January 27, 2020, showcasing over 1,000 works from the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung. Highlighted were 14 key objects and case studies that explored the school's history and lasting influence. The campaign surrounding the show positioned Bauhaus as a living reference, connecting its ideas to modern fashion, content, and daily life, drawing more than 130,000 visitors. Also opening that year was the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, which became home to a collection of nearly 49,000 objects, honoring the school's deep roots in the city since its arrival in 1925.
In 2024, the German far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD, tried to shut down celebrations of the Bauhaus. They did this because they believe the Bauhaus didn’t follow tradition. The Bauhaus had also been crushed by the Nazis before World War II. According to political scientist Jan-Werner Mueller, the AfD’s condemnation was meant to use the Bauhaus in a culture war — a form of far-right provocation.
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In September 2020, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, unveiled the New European Bauhaus initiative from the podium during her State of the Union address. This effort, known as the NEB, brings together creativity and cross-disciplinary thinking to link the European Green Deal with daily living. It serves as a space for testing new ideas, bringing together people from all walks of life—citizens, experts, businesses, and institutions—to shape a future that is sustainable, beautiful, and welcoming to everyone.
Sport and physical activity were central to the original Bauhaus approach, with Hannes Meyer, the second director in Dessau, making sure that one day each week was dedicated to gymnastics and exercise. In 1930, Meyer hired two physical education teachers, and the school even applied for public funds to improve its playing field. As Meyer said, sport was a way to counter what he called a "one-sided emphasis on brainwork." Bauhaus instructors believed that students who actively engaged with space and movement through physical activity could express themselves more fully. They also saw sport as key to wellbeing and community spirit. This integration of body and mind was part of the interdisciplinary method that shaped revolutionary ideas, ideas that continue influencing our environments today.
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