Bauhaus School

History of Bauhaus School
The Bauhaus was one of the first colleges of design. It was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and was closed in 1933 by the Nazis. The Bauhaus holds a place of its own in the culture and visual art history of the 20th century, and has spread to far corners of the world. One of the main goals for the Bauhaus was to renew architecture.

The Bauhaus school bought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists. The Bauhaus was almost the only to attempt to achieve reconciliation between the aesthetics of design and the more commercial demands of industrial mass production.

In 1923 Bauhaus turned its attention to industry as a result of works of aesthetically pleasing and useful were mastered by the means of design. The first major Bauhaus exhibition was opened in 1923 reflected the revised principle of art and technology a new unity spanned the full spectrum of Bauhaus work.

Throughout the 1920s The Nazi Party and other fascist political groups opposed the Bauhaus as they considered it a front for communists, especially because many Russian artists were involved with it.

The school was moved from Weimar to Dessau, from Dessau again to Berlin, and was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime in 1933.

Throughout decades following its closer the Bauhaus has had a major impact on art and architecture trends especially in Western Europe and the United States.

Founders
Walter Gropius was the man who founded the Bauhaus School in 1919 and was director until he stood down in 1928, when Hannes Meyer became director. He was fired in 1930, and replaced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was director until the schools close in 1933.

Gropius was born in 1883 in Berlin. He studied architecture from 1903 until 1907. After this he worked in Peter Behrens' practice until 1910 when he opened his own. Around this time he became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, a group whose aim was to promote creativity in design. He founded the Bauhaus School in 1919 and was director until 1927. He stayed in Europe and England until moving to America in 1937 to take up a teaching position at Harvard. In 1938 he opened a joint practice with Marcel Breuer. He died in Boston in 1969.

Meyer was born in 1889 in Switzerland. he took over as director of the Bauhaus school in 1928, and it was under his Communist beliefs and influence that many of the students followed, thus bringing unwanted political attention to the school. He was fired as director in 1930 by the Mayor of Dessau. After his sacking, he and several students formed a group whose projects included architectual structures and urban planning projects. He travelled a lot after this group was also forced to quit, but returned to Switzerland where he died in 1954.

Mies was born in 1886 in Germany. Before opening his own practice in 1912 he worked for several years at the practice of Peter Behrens, and studied his craft. He designed many buildings, including skyscrapers. He became the director of the Bauhaus School in 1930 and stayed on until the school was forced to close in 1933 by the new German Nazi Government. In 1937 he moved to Chicago where he became the head of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also later designed this Institutes new campus, as well as many structures in his style of open space, steel and glass. He died in Chicago in 1969.

Style
Bauhaus was a Utopian driven school in Germany that believe in changing the world through design. Bauhaus means "build House". Bauhaus movement started in 1919-1933, it's main aim was to bring arts and crafts together to make a better place for people to live in. Walter Gropius the founder of the Bauhaus school was known to say " Form follows function and together let us

desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity” Walter Gropius http://thinkexist.com
The main influences to this movement was in architecture, future, and in typography. The style is referred to being spare, functional, and geometric. Which appealed to the Western Europe.

The Impact of Bauhaus
In the decades following its end, the Bauhaus had a major impact on the trends of art and architecture in Western Europe, The USA, Canada and Israel. The style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design and typography.

One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft and technology, and the exploration of fundamentals such as the material properties of wood and metal or how colours and forms operated within an image instead of recreating or imitating great artworks fo the past. Today’s “Basic Design” course comes from Bauhaus’ Vorkurs (“initial” or “preliminary course”), which is offered in architectural and design schools all over the world.
One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is modern furniture design. Many chair designs we see today are created in the Bauhaus style - sleek and geometric. Buildings and other architectural structures we see are also influenced by the Bauhaus style. The city of Chicago is probably one of the best examples of this.