INSPIRING INNOVATORS:IT COULD BE argued that the most influential school founder of the 20th century was not, first and foremost, a teacher or an academic, but rather a visionary architect who set up an art college. It only lasted 14 years, but the Bauhaus school's impact as the home of Modernist design endures, and its success ensures founder Walter Gropius's place as one of the most significant figures of 20th-century art and architecture.
The school was founded out of the ruins of the first World War. Gropius had made his name working with the Berlin architect Peter Behrens and then as a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of artists, designers and industrialists, from 1910.
The following year, Gropius designed the Fagus Works in Alfeld, a factory that made shoe lasts, or moulds: with its glass facade and functionalist aesthetics, it was a harbinger of the Bauhaus style, and was recently designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco.
But Gropius was conscripted and served on the Western Front during the war, narrowly surviving injury. Returning from battle, Gropius was inspired to spread his desire to see a unification of artistic purpose, a synthesis of craftsmanship, design and artistry. For Gropius, this was more than just a personal preference – he firmly believed that such an approach could be socially transformative.
He got an opportunity to put this into practice in 1919 when he was invited to become director of a merged Grand Ducal Saxonian school of arts.
He transformed the merged institutions into the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, issuing a pamphlet that contained his manifesto for the school, and for art in general, with a famous Cubist woodcut of a cathedral by Lyonel Feininger on the cover. It was stirring stuff: “Architects, sculptors, painters – we all must return to craftsmanship! For there is no such thing as ‘art by profession’. There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan. The artist is an exalted artisan,” he wrote.
“So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come.”
By these ambitious criteria, the Bauhaus was perhaps a failure, but in every other respect it was a huge success – its ethos had a lasting effect on modern architecture, furniture design, typography and art. The teaching faculty read like a dream team of early Modernist art, with Feininger, sculptor Gerhard Marcks and expressionist painter Johannes Itten there from the start, to be joined by such illustrious names from the world of art as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy over the next few years.
The school stayed small, with between 130 and 150 students at any given time, and it was a freewheeling, experimental sort of place, as much an artists’ commune as art college, embracing a variety of artistic visions. Gropius had specified the importance of “Cultivation of friendly interaction between masters and students outside of work, including theatre, lectures, poetry, music, costume parties. Development of a celebratory atmosphere at these gatherings.”
These parties became a legendary part of Bauhaus lore, and the somewhat bohemian lifestyle created tensions with the authorities in Weimar. Eventually, Gropius moved the school to Dessau in central Germany in 1925, designing the famous building that remains so synonymous with Bauhaus. Almost as much as the building, the famed lettering, using a typeface designed by the Austrian designer Herbert Bayer, came to be seen as a potent distillation of the Bauhaus aesthetic.
Despite the exalted status of the building in the founding manifesto, architecture itself wasn’t taught at Bauhaus until 1927, shortly before Gropius left to set up a private practice in Berlin. He was succeeded as Bauhaus director by Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, before Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over in 1930. Facing political pressure from the Nazis, who considered Bauhaus “unGerman”, Mies van der Rohe closed the school in Dessau and moved Bauhaus to Berlin in 1931, but by April 1933, it was clear the authorities would not let the school continue to operate independently, so Mies van der Rohe dissolved it that July, a sad end for one of the influential art colleges of the 20th century.
Gropius, however, went on to further success of his own, leaving Germany in 1934 and arriving in the US in 1937, where be began teaching at a more conventional place of education, Harvard. His status allowed him to continue to spread his architectural vision, and he founded The Architects’ Collaborative, or TAC in 1945, which was responsible for many of Gropius’s most famous projects, including the Harvard Graduate Center, the University of Baghdad, the John F Kennedy Federal Office Building in Boston and, most notoriously, the controversial Pan Am Building in New York. TAC also focused on designing public school buildings.
While it is as an architect that Gropius is best remembered, his most ageless achievement might be his notion of the importance of design. Speaking about the subject he once said: “Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.”
He died in Boston in 1969, aged 86.
