The German School That Lasted Fourteen Years

Walter Gropius opened the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in April 1919, a few months after the German Empire collapsed. The school combined a fine-arts academy with a craft workshop, a marriage that no respectable European art school of the 19th century would have considered. Students learned to weld and weave alongside painting and color theory.

It moved twice — to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed the famous glass-and-steel main building, then to Berlin in 1932 under Mies van der Rohe. By August 1933, pressure from the new Nazi government had forced the faculty to dissolve the school themselves rather than be shut down by decree.

The diaspora is what made Bauhaus global. Mies and Gropius landed at Harvard and IIT in Chicago. Josef and Anni Albers ended up at Black Mountain College and then Yale. László Moholy-Nagy started the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. Within a decade, American architecture schools were teaching Bauhaus principles as if they had always been there.

The ideas that traveled were specific: standardized parts, honest materials, sans-serif typefaces, the open floor plan, the tubular-steel chair. Marcel Breuer's 1925 Wassily chair is still in production. So is the Barcelona chair Mies designed in 1929. Walk into any modern kitchen with a flat-front cabinet and a continuous countertop and you are inside an argument the Bauhaus made about how rooms should work.

Fourteen years of operation, three cities, roughly 1,250 graduates. The output-to-influence ratio is hard to beat.