The Bauhaus: Fourteen Years That Changed a Hundred — How to Read the Shape of Things

Introduction — A School That Existed for Only Fourteen Years

The Bauhaus opened in Weimar in April 1919 and dissolved itself in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. Its lifespan was fourteen years. There were never more than a few hundred students enrolled at a time, and even adding up every graduate the estimate comes to around 1,300. It is a scale at which nothing would seem odd about calling the whole thing a brief disturbance at one art school in a provincial town.

And yet the office chair we sit in, the icon grid on a smartphone, the typeface on a subway map, the flat-pack furniture in an IKEA showroom, even the very sense that good design is design with the excess taken off, all of it connects back to those fourteen years. This imbalance is the heart of the Bauhaus story. The school existed briefly; the influence lasted long.

While the story lasted, the facts were often flattened. The sentence quoted as a byword for the Bauhaus did not actually belong to the Bauhaus; the founding manifesto cried that all the arts converge on architecture, yet the architecture department only appeared eight years later; and the object that earned the school the most money was not the tubular steel chair sitting in a museum but wallpaper. Let me follow it in order.

From Weimar to Berlin — A Map of Fourteen Years

Walter Gropius founded a new school in 1919 by merging the fine art academy and the crafts school in Weimar. The name was Bauhaus, a coinage that inverted an old word for the medieval building lodge. On the cover of the founding manifesto was the woodcut Cathedral by Lyonel Feininger. A Gothic cathedral under three stars, an image of the medieval guild where painters and sculptors and craftsmen gathered for a single work of architecture, deliberately pulled into the present. That a school of twentieth-century machine civilization set out from a medieval metaphor is worth remembering.

The Weimar period did not last. When the right took the state parliament in the 1924 elections the budget was cut in half, and the school shut itself down and moved to Dessau. The Dessau building designed by Gropius opened in December 1926. A glass curtain wall flowing around the corner, wings split by function, a layout you have to look down on from the roof to see whole. The building itself was the platform of the school.

In Dessau the school was at its most productive and at the same time its most political. Gropius resigned in 1928, and his successor Hannes Meyer pushed the school hard toward social need and cost calculation before being dismissed in 1930 for being a communist. The last director, Mies van der Rohe, banned political activity and shrank the school around architecture. When the Nazis took the Dessau city council in 1932 the school moved to an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz and became a private institution; after a Gestapo search in April 1933 it dissolved itself that summer.

The Preliminary Course — Six Months of Handling Materials Instead of Theory

The invention out of Bauhaus teaching that survived longest is not a particular piece of furniture but the preliminary course. Every new student had to pass through it for half a year before being assigned to a workshop. The first-year foundation classes at design and art schools around the world today are, broadly, descendants of those six months.

The person who first designed the course was the Swiss painter Johannes Itten. He brought in theories of color contrast and studies of material texture, but his teaching methods were strange by any standard today. Following a mystical sect called Mazdaznan he shaved his head and wore something like a monastic robe, made students do breathing exercises before class, and involved himself even in their diets. Once Gropius set out to connect the school to industry, a clash was unavoidable. The slogan of the 1923 exhibition was fixed as "Art and Technology, a New Unity," and that year Itten left the school.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, who followed him, took the preliminary course in an entirely different direction. One of the famous assignments by Albers goes like this. He hands the students a bundle of newspaper and tells them, with no tools and no glue, to make something that stands using only the strength of the paper itself. Instead of explaining in a lecture that folded paper bears load, he makes them discover it with their hands. What Albers taught was not form but an attitude of interrogating material.

The workshop system stood on the same logic. Each workshop had two masters. A master of form in charge of shaping (painters such as Kandinsky, Klee and Schlemmer) and a workshop master in charge of technique (a carpenter, a metalworker, a weaver). A student was not a student but an apprentice, and instead of a diploma earned a journeyman certificate. It was a device for tearing down the old hierarchy in which the artist stands above and the craftsman below. In the manifesto Gropius stated flatly that there is no essential difference between artist and craftsman.

There was a mismatch here too, though. This was a school that declared all the arts finally converge on architecture, and yet the proper architecture department only came into being in 1927, eight years after the school opened. Until then a student who wanted to learn architecture had to pick it up over the shoulder in the private office of Gropius.

Whose Sentence Is "Form Follows Function"

When people sum up the Bauhaus in one sentence, a line follows almost automatically. Form follows function. And yet this sentence was never a Bauhaus slogan.

The source is an essay on the tall office building written by the American architect Louis Sullivan in 1896. That is twenty-three years before the Bauhaus opened. What is more, what Sullivan meant was far from a machine aesthetic. Citing the wing of an eagle and the shape of an apple blossom, he was speaking an organic analogy: as form follows function in nature, so should a building. His own buildings are in fact extraordinarily ornate. The facades he left in Chicago and Buffalo are covered in terracotta foliage. The sentence of an architect who loved ornament became the slogan of a movement that treated ornament as a sin, and drifted that way for a hundred years.

What the Bauhaus actually put forward is closer to the slogan of the 1923 exhibition, "Art and Technology, a New Unity." It was not a declaration that only function should remain but a question about how to combine the shaping sense of art with industrial production. And that combination failed often.

The most honest example is the table lamp of glass and metal that Wilhelm Wagenfeld made in 1924. Still in production today, the lamp looks like something stamped out by a machine, but in fact it was made almost entirely by hand, and so it was expensive. Wagenfeld later recalled manufacturers looking at his lamp and asking why something that looks machine-made costs so much. The period in which the forms of the machine age were made by hand went on for quite a while. Rather than form following function, form had become a style that expressed a belief in function.

Tubular Steel Chairs and Looms — And the Workshop Where the Women Piled Up

The most famous object the Bauhaus left is the tubular steel chair of Marcel Breuer. Hungarian-born, a student who became master of the furniture workshop, he was looking at the handlebars of his newly bought Adler bicycle in 1925 when the thought came. Seamless steel tube is light and strong and can be bent. The B3 chair, finished the following year, erased the bulk of the armchair with nothing but a few leather straps and a tubular frame. Today the chair is called the Wassily, but that name was not given at the Bauhaus; it is a trade name applied by an Italian manufacturer in the 1960s. It was marketing drawn from the fact that Kandinsky, at the same school, had liked the chair.

The 1928 cantilever chair by Breuer has a more complicated backstory. The structure that takes a body weight on tube bent forward with no back legs was proposed first by the Dutch architect Mart Stam in 1926, and after court battles in the 1930s the rights to the cantilever chair went to Stam. It is a common scene in design history. A new form usually comes out of several hands almost simultaneously, and the name attaches to only one.

In the metal workshop there was Marianne Brandt. The tea infuser and pot she made in 1924 are objects built only from hemispheres, cylinders and discs, looking like an exercise in geometry. That pot, sold at auction in 2007 for 360,000 dollars, was in fact never mass-produced. Where Brandt actually met industry and succeeded was elsewhere. The Kandem bedside lamp she designed with Hin Bredendieck for the lighting firm Korting und Mathiesen sold in the hundreds of thousands. The objects a museum remembers and the objects a market sold are often different.

In the weaving workshop there was Anni Albers. The wall covering she submitted as her diploma work in 1930 was a textile woven so that one face absorbed sound and the other reflected light. It was a material that solved a real problem in the auditorium of a trade union school, and she received her degree for the work. In 1949 she became the first weaver to hold a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But Anni Albers did not go to the weaving workshop because she wanted to weave. Here the shadow of the school has to be named. The 1919 manifesto stated that anyone could apply regardless of age or sex, and there are counts showing that women outnumbered men among the students enrolled in the first semester. The following year, at a meeting of the masters, Gropius set a policy of handling women applicants separately and sending them, as a rule, to the weaving workshop. Grounds along the lines of women thinking in two dimensions were pressed into service. Women who got into the metal or furniture workshops were exceptions, like Brandt, and even they had to endure open slights from the male students. Only one woman ever became a master: Gunta Stolzl, who led the weaving workshop.

And then there is a final irony. What actually held up the finances of the school was this area treated as second class. Licensing of fabrics from the weaving workshop and, above all, the Bauhaus wallpaper issued in 1929 with the Rasch brothers. Patternless, carrying only a fine texture, this wallpaper sold in the millions of rolls and became the largest source of income the school had. A hundred years later it is still in production.

The Paradoxical Globalization Made by Closing the School

When the school closed in 1933, the Nazis presumably thought they had ended the experiment. The result was the exact opposite. As teachers and graduates scattered, the Bauhaus turned from a local German episode into a global standard.

Gropius went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1937, and Breuer joined him. Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago the same year, and after various turns that school became the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies van der Rohe crossed to Chicago in 1938 and took over the architecture department at Armour Institute, and twenty years later put up the Seagram Building in New York (1958). Josef and Anni Albers went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933. Josef Albers, who barely spoke English, is said to have answered the question of what he had come to teach by saying he had come to open eyes.

Let me clear up one widespread misunderstanding here. The White City of Tel Aviv became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003 thanks to nearly 4,000 white buildings put up in the 1930s, and it is commonly called a Bauhaus city. But among the architects who designed those buildings, only a few, such as Arieh Sharon, had actually studied at the Bauhaus. Most had trained in Brussels, Ghent, Rome and Paris. What the White City testifies to is not the spread of a school called the Bauhaus but the spread of a common language called the International Style. The name was attached afterward.

In postwar Germany the place that continued the lineage most directly is the Ulm School of Design (1953–1968). It was founded by Inge Scholl, sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose, together with Otl Aicher, and its first rector was the Bauhaus graduate Max Bill. From 1955 Ulm collaborated with the appliance company Braun. The record player Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams presented in 1956 earned the nickname the coffin of Snow White because of its transparent acrylic lid. The principles of good design that Rams laid out, and his "less, but better," became the baseline of industrial design for decades afterward, and Jonathan Ive of Apple has publicly acknowledged the influence of Braun products several times. Lay the lineage out and it reads like this. From the workshops of Dessau through the classrooms of Ulm to the radios of Braun, and then to the device in your hand.

Is Minimalism Always Right — How to Question an Object

That is the victory narrative. Now it is time to look at the bill.

First, the universal often erases the local. Flat roofs and white walls are rational in the Mediterranean but expensive to maintain in climates with a lot of rain and snow. The ideal of a form that works on any piece of ground easily became, in practice, the export of one particular climate and one particular way of living to the rest of the world.

Second, there were failures at the scale of the city. The large public housing project of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was built in the mid-1950s on the principles of modern architecture and was demolished by explosives from 1972. The critic Charles Jencks pointed to that scene as the time of death of modern architecture; his specifying the hour and the minute was rhetoric, and later studies concluded that the real causes were not design alone but racial segregation, financial structure and absent management layered together. Still the lesson remains. A clean drawing is not the same thing as a livable life.

Third, the price. Form with the excess taken off was meant for cheap mass production, yet today an authentic chair in the Bauhaus lineage generally sells for thousands of dollars. The inversion by which simplicity becomes a sign of luxury had already begun in the Bauhaus years.

Fourth, the monopoly of taste. In 1966 Robert Venturi answered the "less is more" of Mies with "less is a bore." Ornament and symbol and noise are not waste; they are also how people remember a place. The balanced conclusion runs like this. Minimalism is one answer, not the answer, and the reason that answer looks like the answer is that our eyes have been trained that way for a hundred years.

So the practice I want to propose at the end is not a way of recognizing good design but a way of reverse-engineering the reason for a form. Pick up one object within reach right now. A cup, a remote control, a door handle, a subway grab handle, anything will do. Then ask five things in order.

1. What did the material and the process force. Why is this corner rounded. Injection molding dislikes right angles. Half of a form is already fixed by the way it is made.
2. What did the body demand. Where are you meant to hold it, and where are you meant not to. Look for the hot part, the slippery part, the hollow where a finger lands.
3. What did cost and quantity decide. How many parts are there, are the screws visible or hidden. Hiding a single screw costs money too.
4. What did rules and fashion add on. Safety standards, the place for the logo, and the parts that simply had to look that way in that decade. Compare it with a product photo from ten years ago and this layer shows up most clearly.
5. Who did this form exclude. Left-handed people, weak hands, low vision. This is the question that checks whether we are missing what the Bauhaus missed.

Throwing these five questions at one object takes two minutes. And once you have done it, it does not easily wear off. Because objects start to look not like the result of taste but like the result of constraints reaching an agreement.

Closing — How to Exist Briefly and Last Long

I do not think the reason the Bauhaus closed after fourteen years and still lives a hundred years later is that it made good chairs. What this school left was not objects but a form of question. Where did this form come from, who can make it, how many can be made, and is it right.

Those questions outlast answers. White walls and flat roofs have already aged into the style of one era, but just as the world was rearranged after printing collapsed the price of knowledge, the habit of asking first about the conditions under which a thing is made can be written anew every time the conditions change. This evening, pick up one object on your table and ask it five times. The moment you answer why that thing looks the way it does, you catch a brief glimpse of the meeting room of the person who made it.