Bauhaus Building, Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius (1924)

Bauhaus School Building, Dessau. Walter Gropius, Architect.

Description:
The Bauhaus was a movement, a school, a method of education and a way of relating art to society. It was born in the midst of the revolutionary atmosphere of the spring of 1919. Its principles were presented in the Bauhaus Manifesto of April 1919, primarily authored by the architect and first head of the Bauhaus school, Walter Gropius. “Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between the craftsmen and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day towards heaven from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”

The Bauhaus school attempted to train creative young people to be both artists and craftsmen and marry art and industry. In the architecture of Walter Gropius, the design of Marcel Breuer, and the paintings of Vassily Kandinsky, the school produced works that changed the places in which people worked, the houses in which they lived, the furnishings and accessories that filled their homes, and their ideas of beauty. The revolutionary nature of the art and the progressive nature of the politics of much of the Bauhaus faculty and students led to conflicts which required the school to move twice during the Weimar period. Many of the leading figures of the Bauhaus school fled when the Nazis took power and some such as Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer had significant careers Iater in the United States.

For more information on the Bauhaus building shown in the photo, above, go to the following Architecture Week article: http://www.architectureweek.com/2000/0830/culture_1-1.html