Bauhaus

Bauhaus: a blueprint for the future

On the eve of a Barbican retrospective, Rowan Moore explores the enduring appeal and influence of the Bauhaus school

Rowan Moore

guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 April 2012 11.55 BST


Walter Gropius’s 1925 Bauhaus building in Dessau was badly damaged during the war but has now been restored. Photograph by Christian Irrgang

Not much united Walter Ulbricht, the Stalinist dictator of East Germany for two decades, and Tom Wolfe, celebrant of the splendours and follies of American capitalist excess. Not much, except a loathing of the Bauhaus and the style of design it inspired. Ulbricht called it "an expression of cosmopolitan building" that was "hostile to the people" and to "the national architectural heritage". Wolfe called it "an architecture whose tenets prohibit every manifestation of exuberance, power, empire, grandeur or even high spirits and playfulness".

For Ulbricht it was alien to Germany, for Wolfe it was alien to America. Both agreed that it was placeless, soulless and indifferent to ordinary people's needs. And if the Bauhaus attracted such consistent forms of hostility, that is due to the power and coherence of the image it presented to the world, of disciplined and monochrome modernist simplicity, usually involving steel and glass. Given that it was actually a short-lived and semi-nomadic school of design and art with the usual riot of individualists, visionaries, eccentrics, schemers and geniuses that such places attract, this appearance of unity was an achievement.

From May the Barbican is staging an exhibition of 400 of the Bauhaus's works, the first in Britain on this scale for 44 years. It will stress the breadth of its output, including paintings by Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy, furniture by Marcel Breuer, textiles by Gunta Stölzl, architecture by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, photography, film, ceramics, theatre, graphics and product design. It promises to portray the central ideal of the Bauhaus, "to change society in the aftermath of the first world war", as the Barbican puts it, and "to find a new way of living".

When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 it was with these aspirations for a new life, and for a multiplicity of creative disciplines, together with a stress on the importance of making things as opposed to just theorising about them. But there was not yet a distinct form or direction to these ideas, and almost anything could be considered as a route to a better future, including new spiritualist religions and a strict vegetarian diet which had to be livened up with plenty of garlic. According to Gropius's spectacular wife Alma, whose other husbands and lovers included Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Franz Werfel, the most distinctive feature of the Bauhaus in its early days was garlic on the breath.

Certain questions were unresolved and intensely debated. Was craft or mass production more important? Could art and manufacturing be reconciled? Did individual expression impede service to society? In 1925 the school moved to Dessau, between Berlin and Leipzig. At the time it was an industrial boom town, the base of the Junkers aeroplane company. The harder-edged, more technocratic arguments started to prevail. The young Marcel Breuer started collaborating with Junkers on making tubular steel furniture of a kind that would eventually become commonplace in boardrooms and forward-thinking homes. Greater attention was paid to the commercial development and marketing of Bauhaus-designed objects.

In Dessau they built, in the extraordinarily short time of one year, the Gropius-designed building that became as famous as the institution it served. With its glass curtain walls and spare rectilinear forms, it crystallised what would become the dominant type of modernist architecture. It was one of the most prodigiously influential buildings of all time, a prototype that would be followed by office buildings, hotels, schools and hospitals in almost any country you can think of. In Dessau, Gropius and his followers could also try out other architectural ideas on the row of houses built for Bauhaus masters, and on 300 low-cost houses built for industrial workers on the Dessau-Torten estate.

In 1932, however, the school moved on again, to Berlin. The next year it fell victim to the National Socialists – another movement that, after the catastrophic trauma of the first world war, sought a new order and expressed itself through memorable visual imagery. Junkers started making Stuka divebombers, not Breuer chairs, and Dessau was all but flattened by bombing in 1945. The Bauhaus building was severely damaged, and only recently has been fully restored. But its influence spread. The Bauhausler diaspora, of ex-students and teachers building in the style they had learned, extended to Tel Aviv and Tokyo. Gropius migrated via London to the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard and designed the Pan Am building above New York's Grand Central station, much disliked for the way it imposed on the view down Park Avenue. He also designed the Playboy Club in London, prompting a new generation of radicals to denounce him for selling out.

To visit the Bauhaus building now is to be struck again by the extraordinary way in which a single construction in a provincial town could have had so much effect. It is also to see nuances that, inevitably, imitators lost. For years the Bauhaus building was known to the wider world mostly through a few black-and-white photographs that stress its more easily copied details, but miss the point that it was a framework for the creative energy of the school. Its stairs, workshops and balconies were places of display as well as function, and its glass walls made a spectacle of its internal activities. One of the key spaces was an auditorium whose stage is connected to the communal canteen, thereby bringing together performance and life. It also has a subtle colour scheme, contrary to Wolfe's assertions that the Bauhaus was only interested in black, white and grey. If it looked like a factory it also had properties of a commune, a cult centre and a theatre.

Although it was founded by Gropius, architecture was not at first the main point of the Bauhaus, and its vast legacy extends from graphics through product design to art. But architecture came to dominate the public image of the place, and the style of the building proved easier to record than the events that happened there. What Wolfe and Ulbricht railed against was its impact on the built environment. Which, if you only look at its form and not at its content, does indeed look sterile. Hopefully, the Barbican show will put this misconception right.

As for Alma, she tired of the work ethic of her husband and his school. At least if Tom Lehrer is to believed. As "Alma", his tribute to her, has it:

But he would work late at the Bauhaus,

And only came home now and then.

She said, "What am I running? A chow house?

It's time to change partners again."

Bauhaus at the Barbican: art as life

At a time when idealism in design and architecture is in short supply, the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican is a timely reminder of this bold and beautiful experiment

Fiona MacCarthy

guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 April 2012 22.54 BST


Farkas Molnár’s Design for a family house (1922). Photograph: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Any mention of the Bauhaus conjures up a sequence of those well-known design objects: a Wagenfeld lamp, a Marianne Brandt teapot, a Marcel Breuer chair. But the Bauhaus was much more than the originator of such now iconic artefacts. It was an idea, a vision of the future, a community of artists and designers whose joie de vivre and dedication made it for a while, until the Nazis killed it, the most celebrated art school in the world.

The concept for the Bauhaus – literally "building house" – came from Walter Gropius, one of the great visionary thinkers of the 20th century and a practising architect himself, from a Berlin dynasty of architects. His famous great uncle Martin Gropius designed the Kunstgewerbe museum, the building now known as Martin Gropius Bau.

The young Gropius's idea for the Bauhaus emerged from his experience of the first world war in which he served as a cavalry officer on the western front for almost the whole four years. His response to the devastating scenes he lived through was a stark determination to "start again from zero". Only a new outlook on design and architecture could provide the means for a shattered civilisation literally to rebuild itself.

His opportunity came in 1919 when he was appointed master of the school of arts and crafts in Weimar that became the Bauhaus. Gropius's vision was for the "unification of the arts under the wings of great architecture". It was a democratic concept of art for the people, art for social betterment in which everyone would share. The Bauhaus aesthetic replaced bourgeois furbelows with a geometry of clarity, sharp angles and straight lines.

The influence of John Ruskin and William Morris, great 19th-century artistic seers, is obvious. But Gropius was too thorough a modernist to put his faith completely in these ancient gods. He was involved as a member or a leader in the myriad small groups of revolutionary artists forming in the European cities of the period. The founding of the Bauhaus took place in the context of a whole movement of European expressionist ardour. The design for the cover of its manifesto, Lyonel Feininger's jagged cathedral with three spires standing for architecture, arts and crafts, is a masterpiece of expressionist graphic art.

In its early years in Weimar, the character of the school was dominated by the Swiss-born painter Johannes Itten. It was Itten who, as Gropius's "master of form", invented the Bauhaus's most lasting contribution to art education, the Vorkurs, the preliminary training course in basic forms, textures and colours for all students entering the school. It was also Itten, a mystic and follower of the esoteric Mazdaznan faith, who established the Bauhaus reputation for crankiness. Students followed him in shaving their heads, wearing loose robes and taking up the Mazdaznan macrobiotic diet consisting of "uncooked mush smothered in garlic". In a fascinating essay on cooking at the Bauhaus, in the catalogue of the new Barbican exhibition, Nicholas Fox Weber quotes Gropius's wife Alma Mahler complaining of all-pervasive "garlic on the breath".

Gropius's marriage to the notoriously fickle Mahler exemplifies the social and sexual networking that underpinned the Bauhaus and was indeed part of its success. Alma was married to the already world-famous composer Gustav Mahler, who was 20 years her senior, when she first met Gropius in 1910. Both were taking a rest cure at Tobelbad in Styria. It was a spa romance in which Alma was overwhelmed by the young architect whose saturnine good looks could, she said, have had him cast as Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger.

Their torrid on-off love affair destabilised Mahler to such an extent he consulted Freud about the problems in his marriage. Mahler died in 1911. Alongside her equally turbulent affairs with Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Werfel and other cultural celebrities, Alma married Gropius in Berlin in 1915. They divorced in 1920. Gropius made use of his enormous range of contacts, including his wife's lovers, in building up the Bauhaus's reputation.


Factory A, by Josef Albers (1925-6) Photograph: Tim Nighswander

From the early 1920s there was a change of emphasis. Itten left and the aura of crankiness diminished. "The new unity of art and technology" took over as the Bauhaus became dominated by ideas of standardisation and co-operation with industry. Gropius's genius as director of the school lay in his ability to recruit a line-up of teachers of extraordinary talent. Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy: all these were Bauhaus masters. Gropius was also adept at publicising the international scope of Bauhaus design and architecture. Through its publications and its exhibitions the Bauhaus pioneered a truly global language in its use of images and typography.

There was, however, growing opposition to the Bauhaus, with its progressive artistic ideals, as rightwing elements took over in the Weimar state government. Financial support was withdrawn from the school. Gropius made the decision to move the Bauhaus further north, to the industrial estate of Dessau, encouraged by support from the local mayor and by the prospect of links between the school and local industry. Gropius designed a new building for the Bauhaus in Dessau, a radiantly inspiring functional design with a great glass curtain-wall rising high above the city. The interior was fitted by the Bauhaus workshops. The building was immediately hugely influential. It's one of the real masterworks of international modernist design.


Walter Gropius (centre, with cigarette) poses on the roof of the Dessau Bauhaus building with other teaching staff in 1926 (detail).

A short walk from the school, on a pleasant woodland site, was Gropius's own purpose-designed director's house, alongside three pairs of semi-detached houses for Bauhaus masters. Kandinsky and Klee shared one of these white double cubes; Georg Much and Schlemmer shared another; Moholy-Nagy and Feininger the third.

These were the famous Bauhaus years. According to Klee this was "a community to which each one of us gave what we had". The communal life was richly experimental in the areas of theatre and creative play. This was "art as life" with a vengeance, as the Barbican exhibition promises to show. There were wonderful parties, with that element of clowning which was central to Gropius's educational vision. For one fancy dress party Gropius came costumed as his rival modernist Le Corbusier. At the famous Metallic Festival in 1929, Bauhauslers and guests came in metal costumes, jangling, shimmering and glittering, dancing through the night.

The mid-20s saw the evolution in the Bauhaus workshops of such technically sophisticated products as Breuer's tubular steel Wassily armchair, designs which spoke the unmistakable aesthetic language of the modern world. International visitors arrived in Dessau to admire not just the school itself but Gropius's plans for the Törten housing estate on the south edge of the city. This estate, consisting of 300 workers' houses, was his first opportunity for putting into practice his ideas for solving Germany's acute housing shortage by introducing rationalised building components and standardised methods of construction.

As with all experimental ventures, there were problems. The concept of the Bauhaus workshops as laboratories for industrial production failed to make much headway with large scale German manufacturers. Bauhaus products, far from being art for the people, were still in fact exclusive, handmade products for the wealthy. Gropius had not solved the dilemma that had driven William Morris into revolutionary socialism.

In spite of Gropius's theoretic championing of sexual equality within the Bauhaus workshops, in practice female students were directed to the weaving class. Although the best of Bauhaus weaving is sublime, there were evident frustrations in a system in which only one exceptionally determined student, Marianne Brandt, entered the product design workshop, producing that whole sequence of tea and coffee services, lamps and metal ashtrays now viewed as archetypal Bauhaus design.

Given time and a more propitious economic climate, such underlying problems might have been resolved. But time was running out. The internationalist tenets of the Bauhaus told against it as German politics became more crudely nationalistic. By 1928 Gropius saw he had exhausted all possibilities in developing the school and returned to Berlin to refocus on his own architectural practice. The architect Hannes Meyer, a communist and formerly professor of architecture at the Bauhaus, became the new director; he was followed two years later by Mies van der Rohe. Political pressure against the school stepped up as the Nazis took control of Dessau city parliament. In 1932 the Bauhaus in Dessau was forced to close.

Mies van der Rohe reopened the school in the Steglitz suburb of Berlin, taking over a disused telephone factory. This phase did not last long. Soon afterwards the Nazis seized control of Germany and Hitler became chancellor. The Bauhaus was marked out as "one of the most obvious refuges of the Jewish-Marxist conception of 'art'". In April 1933 police arrived with trucks and closed the school, carting off some of the Bauhaus members. The modernist utopia, or what was left of it, was ended by a regime that viewed the whole spirit of the Bauhaus as degenerate. Gropius and his second wife Ise moved to London in 1934.


An architectural design by Herbert Bayer.

Gropius was one of many foreign architects, designers and artists taking refuge in London in the 30s. Many of them, unlike Gropius, were Jewish. Others were avant-garde artists who were finding the cultural climate in Germany increasingly hostile to their work. Of the Bauhaus masters Moholy-Nagy and Breuer followed Gropius to England. Gropius and Breuer were found accommodation in Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, one of the few modernist buildings in London at that period, while the constructivist Moholy-Nagy rather improbably lived in Golders Green. The convivial Lawn Road Flats became a social centre for the emigrés, a kind of home-from-home where former Bauhauslers mingled with other Hampstead residents, the artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, and leading leftwing intellectuals of the time.

But it was a bitter exile. Life in England was anything but easy for an architect who had once been at the centre of the European avant garde. He was taken into partnership with Maxwell Fry, one of the conditions of his entrée into Britain, but Britain at the time was endemically unsympathetic to the modern. Apart from his still splendidly impressive Impington Village College and some private houses, Gropius found very little work. Schemes for recreating a Bauhaus at Dartington Hall in Devon came to nothing. Attempts to bring Gropius in to restructure design teaching at the Royal College of Art were nervously abandoned. What opportunities we missed.

In 1937 he and Ise left London for the United States. He became director of the department of architecture at Harvard, a post he held for the next 14 years. To some extent he settled into this new environment, becoming a US citizen in 1944. But there were inevitably cruel compromises. In a talk given in London after her husband's death, Ise Gropius described the special problems encountered in America by an architect-idealist who back in Bauhaus days "had always been his own man in a self-created environment", operating his own school with hand-picked staff in a building he had himself designed. A Harvard professorship was quite another thing.

In his own architectural practice, The Architects' Collaborative (known as TAC), Gropius was up against problems of keeping a large office financially viable in a competitive capitalist country. There were some good public buildings, most notably the Graduate Center at Harvard and some beautiful private residences, including Gropius's own house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. But this was a far cry from his original socialist aspirations for low cost mass-produced community housing. The Pan Am building in Park Avenue now seems more than ever indefensible, and Gropius's involvement in the London Park Lane building that became the Playboy Club strikes one as a bitterly satiric joke.

The Bauhaus itself had been more or less forgotten by 1968, the year of the last Bauhaus exhibition held in London, at the Royal Academy. It was there I met Gropius, then 85 years old but still a handsome, upright figure, with an aura of glamorous arrogance. You could see why Klee called him "the silver prince". That exhibition generated a reunion of Bauhauslers, masters and students, as well as a gathering in of Bauhaus objects, scattered since its pre-war closure. At the time it seemed like the exciting rediscovery of a whole lost civilisation.


A set of four stacking tables, designed by Josef Albers in 1927.

The visual style of the Bauhaus spoke vividly to people of my 1960s generation, attuned as we were to the hard-edged and the streamlined, the reduction to essentials. The Bauhaus love of simple geometric form mirrored our own desperation to jettison the worn-out design clichés of traditionalist Britain. The first Bauhaus exhibition coincided with the huge expansion of the British art schools and that whole release of anarchic energy. For the students of the time it was surprising to discover that mad clothes and swinging parties were nothing new at all.

That early exhibition was by no means a complete one: in 1968 Germany was divided, with Weimar and Dessau in the eastern block, where attitudes towards the Bauhaus were at best equivocal. Only after German reunification in 1990 did the important Bauhaus art and design collections in Berlin, Weimar and Dessau begin co-operating. What is so exciting about the exhibition at the Barbican is that it draws on all three of them, in depth.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau, badly damaged in the second world war, has been restored immaculately. It is back to being a building full of light and space and hope. Gropius's own house in the pinewoods, almost totally destroyed, is now being reconstructed and will be opening later in the year. The Bauhaus revival could not be more timely. In a world in which idealism in design and architecture is in short supply, it is good to be reminded of this bold and beautiful experiment in bringing creativity alive.