II. The Bauhaus School - Design and Architecture

The Bauhaus curriculum combined theoretic education and practical vocational training in its educational workshops. As teachers, or Bauhaus Masters, Gropius brought from all over Europe such men as Lyonel Feininger, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Oscar Schlemmer, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Marcel Breuer, Hannes Meyer and Josef Albers also joined the faculty.

The educational process was as much responsible for innovation and new design paradigms as the philosophy of the Bauhaus. Beginning with a required Preliminary Course, students learned the basics of fine art (color theory, composition, drawing). After completing this requirement, the student then chose the discipline he wished to pursue, in specialized workshops for architecture, textile design, furniture design, typography, etc. This pedogogical system was soon copied by art and design schools all over the world. Students studied the problems of manufacturing, the requirements for housing large populations inexpensively, or bringing beauty as well as function into the home through fabric, furniture or utensils.

Some of the more successful designs for the home are now so commonplace, we no longer give them a thought: the use of natural materials for fabric with colorful geometric pattern; the use of tubular steel for furniture; the use of cast concrete and glass in architecture, as well as prefabrication in the building process.

By 1924 mass housing was the great social issue of Weimar Germany; by 1932 no other country had built more housing for its workers. Although architects had been members of the faculty from the beginning, the Bauhaus curriculum did not include architecture until the mid 1920's. With its stated philosophy of Expressionism as its guide, the Bauhaus style of architecture would proceed from certain assumptions: (1) The new architecture was to be created for the workers, (2) The new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois; and (3) The new architecture would return to the original Classical principles of Western architecture.

Buildings soon became theories constructed in the form of concrete, steel, wood, stucco, and glass. A building must have a flat roof and a sheer façade, with neither cornices nor eaves. As color was considered bourgeois, buildings were white, gray, beige, or black. These were, naturally, less expensive and quicker to construct than with traditional building processes. Public housing, built with tax money, soon became dominated by the Bauhaus style. The result was a classical form of rational social housing with open floor plans, white walls, no drapes, and functional furniture. Although the

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