Bauhaus (Temporis collection)

The Bauhaus movement is one of the most significant and consequential cultural emergence of the 20th century. Walter Gropius founded this institute of design in 1919 in Weimar and it was effective in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin. The various professors, Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933, were also renowned architects of their time. The works of the Bauhaus artists, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy as well as those of the students and young faculty members, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Gunta Stölzl and Joost Schmidt, were unanimously admired and aroused the interest of museums across the world.

Their teachings in design are still observed in today’s architecture and design schools but also in general art classes. The products of the Bauhaus, such as Marcel Breuer’s well-known steel pipe furniture, became inexpensive classic design standards. The Bauhaus buildings have made architectural history and now belong to the UNESCO world heritage.

The Bauhaus movement was built on the basis of new aesthetic perspectives and creative teaching programmes for the education of architects, designers and artists for a new, democratic society after WWI.

Its syllabus was a combination of creative training, basic artistic knowledge, productive workshop production, and learning to work as a team. Animated by a social awareness, the Bauhaus would soon combine its creativity with industrialisation and mass production and conceive numerous products which were not only beautiful but durable, useful and affordable.

In 1933, the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, triggering the emigration of many of its members, many choosing America, and thus the ideas of the Bauhaus were spread worldwide.

This book features an overview of the history of the Bauhaus, served by a rich image documentation, and sheds light on its evolution and connection with other movements, and renders the Bauhaus traceable and understandable to the reader.