Bauhaus: The Building Blocks of Modernism

Weimar, Germany. Where the International Style began to find a more integrated manifestation with the founding of an educational institute in 1919.

The International Style or International Modernism had begun in Europe around 1910’s - One of the foremost examples of this style was the Fagus Shoelace Factory designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer in 1911.

It is believed the style was propagated through the works of three seminal contributors - Walter Gropius, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

By 1923, Gropius along with his new staff, restructured the institute to stress the value of art and technology - as he envisioned a more socially and technologically engaged artist.

Gropius designed the now iconic Bauhaus building in Dessau, which the school moved to in 1925. It moved again to Berlin in 1933, where it was headed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, until it was eventually closed down by Nazi authorities.

Inspired by John Ruskin, William Morris, the Arts & Crafts movement and Art Nouveau; Bauhaus believed in the value of the human hand as well as that of science and technology.

The principles of Bauhaus found expression in clean lines, geometrical shapes, new materials like glass and steel and the use of exposed materials – like concrete and metal I-Beams.

Shaped eventually by its own evolution, Bauhaus became a way of thinking, which defined the relationship between art, design, technology and society, and had a major impact on the world, even after its closure in 1933.

Another fundamental factor was that it principally existed, as a center of learning, with a faculty comprising of several progressive educators who widened their impact through their students and so forth, creating a cumulative effect of its teachings and philosophies.

Harvard, Massachusetts - Walter Gropius (c) with students A.P Kanvinde and I.M. Pei

A force majeure was its closure by Hitler and World War II compelling its excellent faculty and its former students to immigrate to far-flung countries, particularly the US – inadvertently multiplying its influence on the world stage.

Architect Walter Gropius and product designer Marcel Breuer emigrated and became professors at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the institute in Berlin – also emigrated to Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

van der Rohe, seen here with students in Chicago, in November 1956.

László Moholy-Nagy traveled to the Netherlands and the UK and then, in 1937, emigrated to the United States. Here he founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which continues to exist today as the IIT Institute of Design.

Josef Albers also emigrated to the United States and joined the Yale faculty, retiring in 1958 at the age of 70.

Not only did these Bauhaus Masters continue to teach and impact a generation of designers, architects and artists from all over the world, their own practices found unprecedented favour and expansion in the US.

Mies van der Rohe, for example, was not only involved with planning and building of IIT's campus until 1956, but received landmark commissions for the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1945-51), the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1949-51) (On left), and the Seagram Building in New York (1954-58).

van der Rohe’s use of exposed steel beams (which came to be known as I–Beams) in the facade of the Seagram Building...

...along with its use of bronze and glass made it a landmark skyscraper in New York, when it was completed in 1958.

Theo Van Doesburg, Dutch painter and leader of the De Stijl movement, also taught at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1921 to 1923.

László Moholy-Nagy, of Hungarian origin, was one of the youngest and most influential thinkers and instructors at the Bauhaus School who later founded what is now IIT Institute of Design in Chicago.

Moholy-Nagy introduced multi-disciplinary art practices to revolutionize artistic media like fine art, photography, sculpture, graphic design and architecture, and is credited with early experiments with the photogram.

Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College and Yale University. While he was best known for his studies on colour, his monochromatic works convey much of his experiments between perception and cognition and his mastery of optical illusion through perceived dimension.