The Bauhaus and the World

The Bauhaus was constantly on the move. Established in 1919, it changed its location several times, moving from Weimar to Dessau (1925) and from Dessau to Berlin (1932). Like its closure in 1933, this was always for political reasons. Many of the members of the Bauhaus subsequently fled the Nazis, emigrating to many different countries around the world and taking the Bauhaus ideas with them to every continent. But they often found that the fame of the art school and its revolutionary ideas and designs had preceded them.

When Arieh Sharon, an architect and graduate of the Bauhaus, arrived in Tel Aviv with his Bauhaus diploma in his pocket in 1931, the city was in a state of change. Jewish immigrants were streaming to Palestine from all over the world to build a future for themselves. Sharon and other immigrant architects gave the city a face. They brought the teachings of European avant-gardism to Israel and built in a style that was plain and functionalistic, with clear lines and curved balconies. In all, 4,000 houses were built in the 1930s in the Bauhaus and International style, and nowhere can more Bauhaus be seen today than in Tel Aviv.

As the Bauhaus in Berlin was being shut down in 1933, a school with a very similar educational approach was opening in the woods of North Carolina. The head of the Black Mountain College, which taught young people art, literature, music and acting, was Josef Albers, who had taught the legendary preliminary course at the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer even designed a new campus for the college, but, in the end, a different design was used because of the cost.

Architect Lina Bo Bardi moved from Italy to Brazil in 1946 because her husband was to head the new Museu de Arte São Paulo (MASP). She helped to create the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (IAC), which opened a year later and was the first school for design in Brazil and was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus. The Instituto opened with an exhibition of work by the former Bauhaus student Max Bill. The school was active until 1953. The new build of the MASP, designed by Bo Bardi, was inaugurated in 1968.

The campus of what is now the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria occupied the Israeli architect Arieh Sharon for more than two decades. The biggest challenge in its construction was the climate. But even as a student at the Bauhaus under its Director Hannes Meyer, Sharon had been concerned with the effect of the weather on construction planning. On the campus he aligned the building to the course of the sun and made sure of shade and natural ventilation. References to the local Yoruba culture were also integrated, as can be seen here for example over the entrance to the library.

When Harry Seidler, the son of a Jewish textile factory owner, was born in Vienna in 1923, the Bauhaus in Germany was only to last another 10 years. But Seidler was taught by prominent Bauhaus members anyway. In 1945, he was a master student of Walter Gropius at Harvard; in 1946, he studied with Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College, and he worked for Marcel Breuer in New York. When he moved to Sydney in 1948, he built this house for his parents there, and introduced the principles of the Bauhaus to Australia.