Bauhaus is influential german school unifying fine art, craft and industrial design 1919–1933.
The Bauhaus (German: 'house of building') was a school founded in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, with the revolutionary premise that art, craft and industrial production should be taught and practised in unified workshops. Masters including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Oskar Schlemmer worked alongside students to develop a new design language for the 20th century — functional, elegant, unornamented, adapted to industrial manufacture. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, to Berlin in 1932, and was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Its faculty dispersed across the world, spreading its ideas to America, Israel, and beyond. Its influence on architecture, graphic design, typography, furniture and product design is still pervasive — the chairs, posters and buildings we call 'modern' are largely Bauhaus in DNA. Gropius's founding manifesto called for the 'complete building' (Gesamtbau) as the ultimate goal of all the arts, unifying architecture, sculpture and painting under craft training — students began with a compulsory foundation course, developed by Johannes Itten and later Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, that taught color theory, material properties and form before any specialization. The school moved twice — from Weimar to the more industrially minded Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed its iconic glass-curtain-wall building, and finally to Berlin in 1932 — each move reflecting both political pressure and an internal shift from early Expressionist romanticism toward the cooler, more standardized functionalism associated with figures like Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe, the school's final director. The Nazi government, hostile to what it saw as 'degenerate' and internationalist modernism, forced the Bauhaus to close in 1933, but that closure scattered its faculty across the world — Gropius and Marcel Breuer to Harvard, Mies van der Rohe to Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology, Albers to Black Mountain College and then Yale — which is precisely how a 14-year German art school ended up defining the look of mid-century American architecture, furniture and graphic design, from steel-tube chairs to glass office towers to the sans-serif grid systems still underlying most modern web and print design today.