Design ideas of the Bauhaus school – part 2.
Walter Gropius and his school, or how to educate future designers.
“Multicoloured”—that was the answer given in early childhood to the question about his favourite colour by this outstanding modernist architect, demonstrating his strong interest in combining all aspects of life.
Walter Gropius was born in Berlin in 1883. He studied architecture in Munich and then in Charlottenburg, but never completed his studies. His architectural career began with a collaboration with Peter Behrens, whom he joined as an assistant. It was in Behrens’s office that he met, among others, Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In addition to architecture, Behrens was involved in design, giving Gropius an understanding of the comprehensive nature of the design field and of how all branches of art and craft intertwine seamlessly.
Gropius’s first major commissions were two buildings designed in collaboration with Adolf Meyer. The first was the Fagus Factory in Alfeld on the Leine, built between 1911 and 1914. The almost entirely glazed façade of the main building consisted of a curtain wall supported by narrow steel window mullions. The most impressive and innovative solution, however, was the absence of supports at the corners. The second work was a model office building at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne in 1914.
In 1914, Walter Gropius received his first offer of a teaching position, in which he soon proved to be perfectly at home. It was an appointment as director of the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar.
Soon afterwards, the outbreak of the First World War removed all German architects from professional life for four years. Walter Gropius spent the first months after the end of hostilities in Berlin, the centre of socialist and artistic activity, where he became involved with the Novembergruppe. Contact with the organisation’s actively protesting artists, his experience of the war and the prevailing attitudes that diminished the value of humanistic ideals had a profound influence on Gropius. His views became considerably more radical, his idealism intensified, and his sense of responsibility as an architect towards society grew stronger.
On 20 March 1919, Walter Gropius created a new school, called Das Staatliche Bauhaus, through the merger of the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Arts and Crafts. Soon afterwards, in April, a famous manifesto illustrated with Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut cathedral was published in German journals and distributed to art schools. It contained Gropius’s famous, inspirational appeal for a revolution in the artistic world: “Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class divisions that separate craftsmen from artists. Together, let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will bring architecture, sculpture and painting together into a single whole and which, one day, the hands of workers will raise towards heaven as a crystal symbol of a new faith.” These are the words of an idealist and visionary, an enthusiastic, optimistic and courageous leader prepared to undertake every reforming challenge. In this way, the world’s first institution dedicated to uniting all forms of design in relation to everyday life within a defined and comprehensive curriculum came into being.
The founder’s primary aim was to make young
designers understand how inexhaustible the concept of creation is, and thereby to encourage them constantly to seek their own paths and solutions—an indispensable quality in a teacher. Gropius believed that design was neither an intellectual nor a material matter, but an integral part of life, essential to everyone functioning in a civilised society. Therefore, a designer’s education could not be academic; it had to strive to open the mind as broadly as possible to every aspect of life. As Gropius argued, the Bauhaus was never intended to be a style or a system of dogmas. It was to be a revival of contemporary design and to breathe new life into design processes.
An important focus for Gropius was imagination and its enormous significance for creation. He rightly observed that the curriculum should constantly provide nourishment for the imagination and creative power, since the aim was not virtuosity in drawing and craftsmanship. He rejected the prevailing emphasis on textbook education, which did not foster the development of an open, fresh and impartial mind. Gropius’s treatment of psychological aspects of design was particularly important; this approach was new and represented a significant step towards changing the nature of design processes. He regarded psychology as fundamental and primary, while psychological responses to space, form and colour as just as real as structural or economic considerations. He understood design as a kind of language of communication, a code that must be learned by understanding the simplest phenomena, reactions and behaviours. A designer must learn how to look.
Walter Gropius understood the importance of experience in the design profession. He emphasised the need to understand the properties of materials and the processes used to transform them, as well as the necessity for students to test their characteristics and applications independently. He spoke of the inseparability of the drawing board and the building site at every stage of an architect’s education. He also stressed that the general and most important aim of education as a whole was to continually awaken in students an enthusiasm for even greater effort, so that a constantly stimulated mind would itself demand further development. He rejected an excessive emphasis on factual knowledge, instead valuing individual, experiential learning—even when it involved making mistakes and taking risks.
Gropius displayed tremendous openness to new directions, experiments and exploration. He was free of fear and prejudice, knowing that one could not become too attached to any proposition, because everything around us is constantly in dynamic motion and one must follow these changes fluidly. Keep one’s eyes wide open, listen, observe, learn from others, gather experience and turn it into action. This contributed greatly to Gropius’s desire and need to educate young people and reform design education.
In the school’s first academic year in Weimar, 221 students from across Germany and Austria were admitted. They represented an extraordinary cross-section of young people in the broadest sense, ranging in age from 17 to 40, although most were in their twenties. Two-thirds of the group were men, half of whom had served in the war. Most students had to support themselves, so Gropius secured the abolition of tuition fees and financial assistance for students producing objects suitable for sale.
In 1919, Walter Gropius was supported by a distinguished faculty consisting of Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks and Adolf Meyer. In the following years, Georg Muche joined them in 1920, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer in 1921, Wassily Kandinsky in 1922, and László Moholy-Nagy the following year. Education began with a six-month preliminary course whose fascinating aim was to cleanse the young student’s mind of all ingrained prejudices and inhibitions, refresh their thinking, remove the random and unnecessary information accumulated in their minds, and prepare them for new knowledge that would become their own—learned, tested and experienced. The first months introduced students to the very simple experience of proportion and scale, rhythm, light, shadow and colour, while also allowing them direct, individual contact with the properties of materials and the characteristics of tools. The goal was to provide students with the broadest possible insight into their field, since, as Gropius argued, education should proceed concentrically, like the growth rings of a tree: at every stage, the range of subjects should not be selective but as broad as possible, gradually expanding.
The preliminary course was conducted under the supervision of Johannes Itten, whom Gropius was the first to invite to help create the Bauhaus. Under the master’s guidance, students patiently studied the character of materials while seeking their own subjective responses to them. This was done mainly through careful sketches and abstract compositions that revealed the contrasts and differences between individual materials, as well as the ways in which they could be harmonised and combined. These activities enabled students to discover the material with which they felt most at ease and whose working offered the greatest scope for their talents. After completing the preliminary course, they could thus be assigned, without obligation, to a specific workshop where they could develop their newly discovered aptitudes.
This was followed by three years of workshop training. During this course, students worked under the supervision of two masters—an artist and a craftsman working in close collaboration. This system enabled the artistic and technical-craft disciplines to complement each other perfectly, which had been one of the school’s principal aims from the outset. The Bauhaus operated workshops for stonecutting, carpentry, metalworking, ceramics, glass, mural painting and weaving. After three years, students were examined by the masters of the Council of Craftsmen in order to receive a journeyman’s certificate. For those who wished to continue their studies and demonstrated exceptional ability, there was a final stage: the architecture course. This involved practical experiments using building materials, advanced drafting and engineering. The stage concluded with the prestigious distinction of receiving a Bauhaus master’s certificate.
The first achievements of the school were summarised by the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, held in August and September 1923. Works from all the workshops were presented, making Weimar a true centre of the European avant-garde for the duration of the exhibition. In addition to the exhibition, there were lectures, concerts and performances of the Triadic Ballet; the event was organised on a large scale. The exhibition proved the success it deserved: it was seen by 15,000 people and received an enthusiastic response from critics in Europe, the United States and Canada. Despite this, the Weimar bureaucracy was determined to take steps to abolish the school. In 1924, conservatives accused its founders of “Bolshevism” and subversive activity. Gropius attempted various concessions and compromises and fought to preserve the school’s location, but police intervention made closure unavoidable. News of the Bauhaus’s closure provoked protests and a wave of discontent among artists, prominent architects and the press. Nevertheless, the school’s determined front did not surrender, and before long it succeeded in finding a new and more favourable environment.
In April 1925, the school, together with all its equipment and faculty, moved to Dessau, a small but developing city with a promising network of local industries. Gropius chose this location even though larger centres had also submitted offers, and the choice proved to be a sound one.
The Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, ceremonially opened in December 1926, became a veritable architectural manifesto of Gropius’s aspirations and an expression of his successful collaboration with the school’s creators and students. All the social, artistic and technical requirements arising from Gropius’s principles were successfully realised in this ambitious architectural complex.
The Dessau period probably produced the school’s finest designs. This period was favourable for several reasons. The mobilisation of students and staff, together with a sense of the importance and ambitious aims of the undertaking, combined with enthusiasm and a readiness to collaborate in pursuit of the common goal of creating a new headquarters from the ground up. This generated an atmosphere of intensified creative work within the school. There was no room for stagnation or uncertainty; what mattered was action, cooperation and a good result—and such an atmosphere is probably a designer’s ideal environment.
Marcel Breuer’s innovative furniture work comes to the fore here. He began as a student and, years later, became a Bauhaus lecturer. His armchair made of aluminium tubing and fabric is still in serial production today. After discovering the excellent bending properties of steel tubing, Breuer designed entire series of furniture in which he combined this material not only with fabric but also with wood and glass. In this way, he achieved flexibility and lightness of structure. A chair of his design became the prototype for thousands of “S” chairs that began to be mass-produced around the world.
The school’s decline began in 1928, when Walter Gropius announced his resignation as director of the Bauhaus. He appointed Hannes Meyer as his successor, but Meyer was not popular and was too deeply involved in political activity. Gropius’s next choice for the position was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who made great efforts to ensure the school’s proper functioning and brought his purism and perfectionism to the institution. Even he, however, was powerless in the face of the country’s Nazi policies, which closed the Bauhaus in Dessau in October 1932. Mies van der Rohe
attempted to save the school’s ideas by re-establishing it as a private institution in Berlin, but this could not succeed under Hitler’s regime, and the Bauhaus was officially and permanently closed in July 1933.
Article by Anna Kuźnik, an interior architect at Studio KU graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
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