Bauhaus

Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, when architect Walter Gropius merged the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts with the Weimar Academy of Fine Art, the Bauhaus set out to dissolve the old hierarchy separating fine art from craft and industry. Students passed through a foundational Vorkurs before specializing in workshops — weaving, metalwork, furniture, typography, mural painting — taught by masters including Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Emerging amid the political and economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic, the school reimagined design for the machine age, aiming to produce well-made, affordable objects for mass life rather than luxury goods for the few. In 1925, political pressure forced a relocation to Dessau, where Gropius designed the school's glass-curtained headquarters, itself a manifesto in steel and glass; the curriculum shifted toward "Art into Industry," partnering with manufacturers to license Bauhaus-designed lamps, textiles, and furniture. Leadership passed to Hannes Meyer in 1928 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930, each navigating mounting Nazi hostility toward the school's internationalism and modernism. Forced to Berlin in 1932, the Bauhaus closed for good in 1933 under Gestapo pressure. Its faculty scattered across the globe — Gropius and Mies to Harvard and Chicago, Josef Albers to Black Mountain College — carrying its principles into American modernism and cementing the Bauhaus as the single most influential art and design school of the twentieth century.