Bauhaus
In the social and political
turmoil after the end of World War I, Walter Gropius and a group of
like-minded designers and artists, merged Weimar's art school with Henry
van der Velde's College of Arts and Crafts to create a new design school,
the Staatliche Bauhaus. The aim was to start a new style of design and
architecture to suit the needs of what he saw as a new age, in which
aesthetics, function and technology worked together to produce objects
that were at once aesthetically pleasing, efficient and capable of being
mass-produced cheaply. Products from the school included pottery,
furniture and wallpaper.
The most important surviving
Bauhaus buildings are in Dessau, where the school moved in 1925, and
include the Bauhaus school complex itself, which is once again
functioning as a design school, the Master Houses (Meisterhause), the
Moses-Mendelssohn-Centre, the Steel House (Stahlhaus), the Kornhaus and a
reconstruction of one flat in Hannes Meyer's 'housing with balcony
access' complex. In Weimar, the original school building is home to the
Bauhaus-Universitat-Weimer and the Bauhaus museum has notable examples of
Bauhaus furniture. Together these sites have been listed as a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.
In Berlin, the Bauhaus
archives and museum are located in a Walter Gropius-designed building. As
well as a wealth of documents for researchers, the collection holds
numerous pieces made in the workshops by students, as well as books,
paintings, drawings, examples of finished products, architectural plans
and a photographic archive. Other Bauhaus buildings in the city include
the Sommerfeld and Otte houses.
One of the most important
contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of furniture design
including the ubiquitous Cantilever chair by Dutch designer Mart Stam
with its utilization of the tensile properties of steel, and the Wassily
Chair designed by Marcel Breuer.
