In Germany in 1919, after the Great War, amidst ruins and reborn hopes, a group of young people and professionals emerged who might be covered in paint discussing geometry, or wearing robes preaching chromatic spirituality and making baskets as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This strange ecosystem had a name: Bauhaus, “house of construction”, a modest title for the creative laboratory most influential of the 20th century. In this blog, we have mentioned countless times the importance of this movement which has been a constant throughout history design, architecture, art, crafts and, in general, Western culture.

Image taken around 1926, with Walter Gropius (center), Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer and Vassily Kandinsky, among others. 

The origin of the Bauhaus School

Walter Gropius, architect, urban planner, and designer, with ideas bigger than the buildings he designed, decided that the new Germany needed more than bricks: it needed people capable of joining head and handsArt and craft, reason and creative delirium. His proposal was simple and revolutionary at the same time:
Artists and artisans should be one and the same.No ivory towers, no isolated geniuses: everyone to the workshops, everyone mixed together, everyone creating.

In the founding brochure, he proclaimed: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we are all artisans!” And more than one stepped down from their pedestal to learn carpentry, metalwork, ceramics, or bookbinding. The implicit motto was: If you can't build it with your own hands, perhaps you shouldn't design it..

Triadic Ballet (Triadisches Ballett) by Oskar Schlemmer, an avant-garde performance developed at the Bauhaus in 1922. 

A gallery of eccentric characters

The first Bauhaus was a festival of personalities. These were some of the most distinguished teachers:

John IttenBald, in a robe, a fervent practitioner of an unlikely mix of Zoroastrianism, radical vegetarianism, and spiritual discipline, he walked through the workshops like a proto-hippie guru, encouraging students to find their "inner point" before picking up a paintbrush.

Kandinsky y KleeThey seemed like two alchemists of color: one obsessed with the spirituality of forms, and the other with turning lines into visual poetry.

Theo van Doesburg, a neoplasticist infiltrator, who was not officially a professor —Gropius didn't want him to be from the start— but ended up revolutionizing the school's aesthetics with his gospel of straight lines, simplicity, and almost surgical precision.

With such a crowd, it's no wonder the atmosphere was electric. The workshops were a hive of activity, and the legendary parties —white, metallic, kite-like— something like collective performances where costumes, alcohol and creativity flowed.

The Bauhaus was not an aesthetic movement, but an attitudeHis principles were always clear and radical. Here are some of the main ones.

form follows functionNothing exists by chance. Every curve, every angle, every color has a purpose.
Sincere materialsIron that looks like iron, glass that looks like glass. Nothing to hide the essential.
Minimalism without boredomReducing is not impoverishing, it's refining.
Total artworkThe “total work of art”. Architecture, objects, space and life had to fit together like pieces of the same mechanism.
Technology in support of artThe prototypes came out of workshops where machines and artists shared a table.
Media economyPrecision, efficiency, common sense. No unnecessary embellishments.

Bauhaus building in Dessau

The Three Lives of the Bauhaus

Weimar (1919–1925): the spiritual epic

The city of Weimar hosted the original experiment: idealistic, artisanal, festive, almost mystical. Here, the foundations were laid and the interdisciplinary path between visual, performing, and applied arts was opened. Schlemmer directed the theater workshop, where actors became living sculptures and geometry became choreography.

Dessau (1925–1932): the golden age

At the dawn of Nazism, the school was expelled from Weimar by politicians who did not understand such youthful fervor, and it moved to Dessau.
Here they arrived years of heydayThe legendary building designed by Gropius, industrial objects, reproducible prototypes. Lamps, chairs, typefaces, and iconic buildings were all born during this period.

Bauhaus Archive in Berlin

Berlin (1932–1933): the resistance

Cornered by the Nazis, the school moved to an abandoned factory in Berlin.
It didn't last long: in April 1933 it was raided, humiliated, and finally dissolved. To top it all off, the regime organized an exhibition of Put it on art (“degenerate art”) where the Bauhaus occupied the defendants' table.

The role of women in the Bauhaus

The women of the Bauhaus It played a role that was as essential as it was undervalued at the time. Although the school proclaimed itself progressive and “without differences between artists and artisans,” many female students soon discovered that equality had very concrete limits: they were pushed towards workshops considered “feminine”, such as textiles, while their colleagues were oriented towards metal, architecture or carpentry.

However, far from being satisfied, figures like Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt o Otti Berger They transformed those spaces into authentic innovation labs. Albers transformed the loom into a machine for modern thought. Brandt opened the doors of the metal workshop—a territory almost exclusively for men—and designed some of the school's iconic works. Their contribution not only shattered glass ceilings within the Bauhaus but also redefined the a modern design by demonstrating that “minor” disciplines could produce major ideas. Without them, the Bauhaus would have been far less bold, less rich, and certainly far less revolutionary.

Hitler, a frustrated artist with a phobia of modernism, couldn't stand the Bauhaus: there were too many intellectuals, Jews, rebels, and dreamers. So he closed it down.
But the Bauhaus did not fall, it dispersed.

Gropius left for England and then the United States. Mies van der Rohe crossed the Atlantic. Albers, Breuer, Bayer, and so many others scattered across America, Israel, Switzerland… and each carried with them a piece of the Bauhaus spirit. It was impossible to extinguish something that had accumulated so much energy.

Today, the Bauhaus is everywhere, even if we don't always notice it: in the chairs that seem to float in the air; in the clean typography of any contemporary poster; in the glass skyscraper And in homes with clean lines. In Ikea, certainly, and also—why not say it—in Apple.

The Bauhaus changed the way we think about designHe taught us that a simple object can be a manifesto, that beauty can be practical, that art can improve everyday life.
And that a well-done themed party is also a artwork.