Q: What are the impacts of the Bauhaus on modern design?
The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 in Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883 - 1969). In 1923, Walter Gropius introduced the agreement between “creative artists and the industrial world”. The Bauhaus is most famous for the idea of combining forms and functions. They combined both fine arts and design elements to create a curriculum that trained artists and designers to be capable of producing both functional and aesthetic work. One of the main goals was to bring design and technology together. During the Bauhaus period, Fine art and craft were combined together and aimed toward problem solving for an innovative, modern and industrial society. Nowadays, the Bauhaus legacy continues in modern designs, such as minimalism, or design brands like IKEA. In this essay, I will analyze Bauhaus’s influence on modern design, including architecture and furniture design by exploring different examples from different periods of time.
1. About the Bauhaus
I'd like to begin the essay by talking about the Bauhaus. In the book “50 Bauhaus icons", “The State Bauhaus in Weimar was not only one of the earliest, but at the same time one of the most important and successful schools of art and design.” ( Strasser, 2009, 1)
Figure 1.
The Bauhaus School. Image downloaded from http://www.architectweekly.com/2012/12/why-was-bauhaus-style-so-important.html
The school focused on using primary forms and colours, which include
The Bauhaus movement began shortly after the world war 1 in 1919 to re imagine the materialistic good to reflect how we perceive art works. It was a movement initiated by a German architect named Walter Groupius.The Bauhaus movement embraced and emphasized on the simplicity and the basis of a design. (Griffith 2007) The idea behind the movement was to design and manufacture beautiful and practical products using simple and economical techniques. The ideology of the school was not only to reflect society but improve it by combining simplistic beauty with productivity. (Naylor 1968) The Bauhaus implied form follows function which is created by a cross platform of functional craftsmanship in every field whilst experimenting and using different materials.
Modernism was in effect expelled from Germany and many of its champions emigrated overseas as Hitler described modern art as “Bolshevist art”” in his autobiography “Mein Kampf” and “criticized the Weimar Republic for its alleged cultural weaknesses”.(Architecture and Politics in Germany )
The Bauhaus was a school of art, architecture and design that existed in three German cities including Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. The school was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and it lasted until 1933. During its time, Bauhaus went through different distinct periods under different directors and cities including expressionism, constructivism, functionalism and architecture. The Bauhaus was the start of modernism, at the same time, it changed the face of graphic design, interior design, art and architecture. The Bauhaus’s life was limited because of the political world but Bauhaus continued to have its influence all over the globe even after it dissolved. The most influential architects
The main difference between these two schools is that the architects point of view to any design as a means of communication (Chan, 1997). Modern architecture, for example, focus on the aesthetics of architectural language, while post-modernity adjust in constant effort to achieve what is more than unity and focus on the traditional concepts, therefore both schools are in competition with each other. Second basic principle of modern school is the production beauty by basic technology (Chan, 1997), and this led to a contradiction on the post-modernism architects being attempted to use primitive technology. Their particular case is to access and change the impact of the traditional architecture through all people. Therefore, to achieve this goal they have addressed the issues of beauty and technology within the general concept of the design.
As science was evolving, art and architecture were too forming new ideas and styles. Starting with Einstein, Newton, and Heisenberg- in regard to quantum physics and leaping into architectural advances, it is agreed that this was a revolutionary time for all who lived in this era. That being said, Cubism, Futurism, and Fauvism are important styles in modernistic art. Whether it is literature, poetry, song, or dance, these principles helped to shape the future and individual approach to create our own perspective. The abstract styles discussed, paved the way for Nonobjective art to make its mark on humanity and to make us feel and see uniquely. Not to mention, architecture and the International style that later developed, teaching us modern design. The international style gave us unique structures, distinctly showcasing new synthetic materials, floor plans, and roofs. As one can see, modernistic art provides just as an important part of our everyday life as
The purpose of this essay is to fully employ all of the new observational skills that I have learned from the start of the semester to now. With that in mind, I was feeling very excited to use these new “abilities” as I was observing art. The San Diego Museum of Art was very interesting indeed, and I have never experienced art in such a way that is sort of hard to describe. The museum had paintings and galleries ranging from the Renaissance era all the way to the eighteenth century and even Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well. However, my eyes instantly caught Henri Matisse’s painting, Bouquet, this painting had so many details, elements, and meanings as well as similar characteristics from past chapters that I have read this semester.
Peter Behrens is one of the most influential German designers. At the beginning of the century, he brought forth amazing works in architecture, graphic design, and painting, which began to influence in all these various fields, opening uncharted territory for the generations to come. He is viewed as the founder of modern objective industrial architecture as well as modern industrial design. From the late 1800's he worked as a graphic artist in Munich, where he joined the Jugendstil movement. He produced woodcuts, colored illustrations, designs for book bindings and craft objects. Peter Behrens designed china, glass objects, and patterned linoleum flooring. This fused Graphic Design and Architecture.
This is demonstrated by the art curriculum in Bauhaus (1919-1933) that instructs the modernist ideals of art and design. In lecture eighteen, Professor Muzaffar suggested that the school focused on teaching the fundamental principles of art. Although genderlessness and universality appear only as two ideals of modernism, Bauhaus’s first director, Johannes Itten, shaved his head in attempt to demonstrate these two qualities. He held onto Expressionism and encouraged his students to create art with instincts. Later, there came a move towards abstraction, which was surely not an opposite from Expressionism. Professor Wassily Kandinsky did studies concerning the affinity of line, color and form, whereas Josef Adler published Interaction of Color. What is more, the buildings of Bauhaus themselves, showed a sense of solidity. For instance, the one in Dassau has a geometric outlock and a glass corner, allowing a permeability to nature and the exterior to interact with the
[The Bauhaus Reassessed] What unique about the Bauhaus is the fact that its ideologies epitomize changing concepts concerning the nature and purpose of design in the early twentieth century. The art inherited reinterpreted and then rejected the
The year was 1919. World War I had just ended, and new beginnings were arising. Day –to-day life no longer revolved around the fear of the outcome of World War I. The German youth began to see potential in this at the same time that architect Walter Gropius decided to make a huge decision. After some struggle to break stereotypes, he opened a school, called Bauhaus. With its three locations in Germany, the Bauhaus School of Design was able to produce modern art, train diverse artists, and push the limits.
The Bauhaus School, founded in Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, was initially a school of Arts and Crafts. The Arts and Crafts movement, associated with rich ornamentation and exotic materials sought to unite artists and craftspeople to ensure the survival of beautiful craftsmanship post industrialisation. Gropius wanted to take this further by engaging technology in this process. However, at a time of political turmoil and economic hardship excessive design
The Bauhaus was established in Weimar in 1919, with the architect Walter Gropius as its founder and first director (Harrison and Wood 1993, p. 338). The school was founded on Gropius’s principle of the importance of combining and unifying all the artistic and technical realms; a separation, which had been to the detriment of existing art schooling (Girard 2003, p. 6-‐7). Gropius wanted to combine art and technology or “culture and civilisation” (Droste 2012, p. 15). The Bauhaus consisted of workshops with two distinct instructors, a “craft master” who was a
The Bauhaus was created by Walter Gropius in the city of Weimar. He was a German architect
The first decades of the 20th century in modernism was characterised by enormous social and political changes with a radically changing lifestyle. Technology, manufacturing, science and art was the driving force. The Bauhaus movement was one of the most influential modern design movements of the 20th century reaching its peak between the two world wars. It was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar in Germany by architect Walter Gropius. Although the Bauhaus was founded by an architect, it did not actually have architecture department during its early years. Instead, Gropius wanted to focus on a study of art that would eventually encompass many different aspects of design, and tying them all together. The word Bauhaus
“Design is for living”. The adage fashioned a widespread shift in design during the 1940s and 1950s. It revolutionized the form by creating an electrifying visual language that signaled a new age and a fresh start- two of the powerhouses were Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses were a husband and wife team whose unique synergy led to a whole new expression in furniture and architecture. The couple advocated the principles of Modernism through the adaptation of innova¬tion from wartime technology .Their design style can be branded as “California Modernism,” a term that is often used interchangeably with “Mid-Century Modernism.” This distinct style embodied an approach to design that opposed the “social conscience” of the Bauhaus in order to embrace looser, warmer design which was both more expressive of local character and in touch with the realities of commerce and salesmanship. With the west-coast coming-of-age, economy shift from making goods to producing information and the global expansion of American culture; their lives and work embodied some of America’s defining movements. They contributed to architecture, film, industrial and graphic design. They were known as pioneers of affordable mass production and residential constructions. The evolution from furniture designers to cultural ambassadors validated their bents and overlaps with country’s interest and projected how design can enhance the lives and practical needs of ordinary people and not just the elite.