Looking at the Bauhaus style

Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, and for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.

The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German verb for "build") is Architecture House. Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture, and one of the most important currents of the New Objectivity.[

• The school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors (Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933).

• • The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique,

instructors, and politics. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for instance, although it had been an important revenue source, the pottery shop was discontinued.

• When Mies took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.

Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927

Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in England during the mid 1910s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up to them. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split in 1921.

The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

The Fagus Works shoe factory, in Alfed, Germany, was one of his early designs, conceived in 1911 and 1912 with Adolph Meyer.

Interior - gropius

Many outstanding artists of their time were lecturers at Bauhaus:

• Annie Albers• Josef Albers• Herbert Bayer• Marianne Brandt• Marcel Breuer• Avgust Černigoj• Lyonel Feininger• Naum Gabo• Walter Gropius• Ludwig Hilberseimer• Johannes Itten• Wassily Kandinsky• Paul Klee

•

• Gerhard Marcks• László Moholy-Nagy• Piet Mondrian• Georg Muche• Hinnerk Scheper• Oskar Schlemmer• Joost Schmidt• Lothar Schreyer• Naum Slutzky• Wolfgang Tumpel• Gunta Stölzl• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe• Max Bill

Berlin

Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural 'policy' in the 1930s, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had labelled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs.

Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for Communists, Russian, and social liberals. Indeed, second director Hannes Meyer was an avowed Communist, and he and a number of loyal students moved to the Soviet Union in 1930.

The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus -- the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit -- were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.

Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens' pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined designs for the company's graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, and made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel.

Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meier worked for him in this period.

Peter Behrens hanging light fixture,

László Moholy-Nagy [ˈlaːsloː ˈmoholi-ˌnɒɟ]) 1895 –1946) Hungarian painter

Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz to a family of mixed Jewish and Hungarian heritage. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his uncle, Nagy. Later, he added the pseudonym "Moholy" to his surname, after the town in which he grew up. After studying law in Budapest and serving in the World War I, Moholy-Nagy was in Vienna in 1919 where he first discovered constructivism in exhibitions of works of Malevich, Naum Gabo and El Lissitzky.

• In 1923, he replaced Johannes Itten as the instructor of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus. This effectively marked the end of the school's expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial integration. The Bauhaus became known for the versatility of its artist and Moholy-Nagy was no exception.

• Throughout his career he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, and industrial design. One of his main focuses was on photography. He coined the term "the New Vision", for his belief that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not.

• His theory of art and teaching was summed up in the book The New Vision, from Material to Architecture. He experimented with the photographic process of exposing light sensitive paper with objects overlaid on top of it, called photogram.

1922

19241939

Moholy-Nagy László: Fotogram.

The Broken Marriage

1925

sculpture