Bauhaus movement: we celebrate one hundred years of school that laid the foundation for industrial and graphic design

The Bauhaus is an artistic movement that emerged 100 years ago – in April 1919 – in Weimar, a city that is now part of the German state of Thuringia. Its founder was Walter Gropius, architect, designer and urban planner born in 1883 and died in 1969. Gropius founded the Staatliche Bauhaus in 1919.

The name Bauhaus comes from the union of the German words Bau, "construction", and Haus, "house"; Ironically, despite its name and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architectural department in its infancy.

This institution was a school of design that encouraged its students to use innovative materials for the construction of buildings, furniture and other objects. The goal of Gropius was that creations combine functionality and aesthetics. Throughout its history, the Bauhaus settled in Weimar (1919-1925), Dessau (1925-1932) and Berlin (1932-1934). The Nazi pressure on the entity, which he considered socialist and whose administrators were Jewish, caused its closure.

The influence of the Bauhaus has reached various fields. In addition to architecture and various branches of design, several artistic disciplines have followed the postulates of the movement. The Bauhaus, especially in its first phase, proposed to recover the traditional methods in construction and sought to promote the marketing of products accessible to most citizens.

The painters Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Vasili Vasilievich Kandinski; photographer Walter Peterhans; designer Lászlo Moholy-Nagy; sculptor Joost Schmidt; and the architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer are among the representatives of this movement that has left important works in the German cities of Wiemar and Dessau and in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, among others.

His proposals and statements of intent implied the idea of ​​a necessary reform of the arts education as a basis for a consequent transformation of the bourgeois society of the time, in accordance with to the socialist thought of its founder. The first phase (1919-1923) was idealistic and romantic, the second (1923-1925) much more rationalistic and the third (1925-1929) achieved its highest recognition, coinciding with its transfer from Weimar to Dessau. In 1930, under the direction of Mies van der Rohe, he moved to Berlin where he completely changed the direction of his teaching program.

The Bauhaus laid the normative bases and models of what is now called industrial and graphic design; it can be said that before the existence of the Bauhaus, these two professions did not exist as such and were conceived within this school. Without a doubt, the school laid the academic foundation on which one of the most predominant trends of the new modern architecture would be largely based, incorporating a new aesthetic covering all areas of everyday life.

Due to its importance, the works of the Bauhaus of Weimar and Dessau were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1996. Under his direction, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school was a victim of growing harbadment of Nazism. Because the Bauhaus ideology was perceived as socialist, internationalist and Jewish, the Nazis closed the school. Many of its members, including Walter Gropius himself, refugees, eventually settled in the United States to pursue their ideals.