The Story of the Bauhaus: The Art and Design School That Changed Everything

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Daily updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. Dezeen Jobs Weekly Soon after Gropius arrived in the US, he urged Breuer to follow him across the pond: “It’s fantastic here! Don’t tell the English but we are ecstatic that we have escaped the land of fog and of psychological nightmares… Here people are open and free and I believe you would have a very broad field here.” In the US, Breuer and Gropius briefly formed a business partnership, co-designing the Alan I W Frank House of 1939-1940 in Pittsburgh. In 1928, Brandt would succeed Moholy-Nagy as director of the metal workshop, a testament to the esteem in which she was held by her peers. In the decades since her death, Brandt's designs have become icons of Bauhaus and Constructivist aesthetics. The curator of the Berlin Bauhaus Archive Klaus Weber has called Brandt's Model No. MT 49 "Bauhaus in a Nutshell", a work which exemplifies the school's industrial design aesthetic and emphasis upon functionality. One of Brandt's prototypes for the teapot set a record price for Bauhaus objects at Sotheby's in 2007.

The book “50 Bauhaus Icons You Should Know” by Josef Strasser serves as a perfect introduction to Bauhaus, as it features 100 color illustrations and 50 non-color ones, chronicling the works of several masters like Albers, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and Klee. Wilk, Christopher, ed. Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939. Exhibition catalogue. London: V&A Publications, 2006. Additional Essays by Alexandra Griffith Winton This being the centenary year of the Bauhaus, there is a rush of books relating to it. Taschen has brought out a typically sumptuous compendium of the archive, called simply Bauhaus 1919-1933, by the art historian Magdalena Droste. Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, by Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund, describes the Hampstead hive of artistic intelligentsia where the Gropiuses sheltered when they left Germany. Henry van der Velde: The Artist As Designer, by Richard Hollis, resurrects the exceptional architect who created the Weimar art schools from which the Bauhaus grew.

Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the school in 1923 to teach preliminary classes and run a metal workshop, but his real passion was for photography.

My aim in writing was to tell the history of the school as an institution,” she says. “What was the pedagogy? How did it change and what are the underlying aims?”She points out that Gropius’s primary motivation was a belief in art, which he wanted to touch all aspects of human life. Plenty of others have done this, but it can’t be said too often. Whatever valid critiques might be made of his work, to dismiss him as a mechanistic functionalist is not one of them. She is keen even to defend the Pan Am building that, as a grand old man, Gropius designed above Grand Central Station in New York, terminating the view down Park Avenue in a way that even sympathetic critics see as a monolithic mistake.

Bauhausbücher 9: Wassily Kandinsky „Punkt und Linie zur Fläche. Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente“, 1926. Oskar Schlemmer taught at the school from 1920 to 1929, specializing in design, sculpture and murals, but preferring to pursue theater. He was appointed the school’s director of theater activities in 1923 and created an experimental theater workshop in 1925. Albers was appointed to the teaching staff in 1923 before he had even completed his courses at the school. He began in the glass painting workshop and taught furniture design, drawing and lettering.During his tenure at Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s work became more focused on abstract shapes and lines, as displayed in his 1923 painting Composition VIII. Kandinsky remained with the school until its closing. László Moholy-Nagy Comprised of over 120 colour images, this book sees photographer Hans Engels capture the surviving Bauhaus buildings in European cities like Barcelona, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna.