A Study Guide to the Bauhaus

You want to go to the Bauhaus? Then show us what you’ve got. Put together a portfolio of samples of your work and send it to Mr. Gropius. He’ll decide if you have the aptitude and have earned your student card. The card in this photo, by the way, belongs to Arieh Sharon, who is already a year ahead of you (note that name – he’s going to be a major architect in Israel later on).

You’ve been accepted? Then it’s off to Dessau! The Bauhaus is just a few metres away from the railway station. Step by step you come closer to this amazing building that was only inaugurated last year, on 4 December 1926, with more than 1,000 guests from all over Germany and the world. Perhaps the city is under a blanket of fog and you feel like the journalist Nelly Schwalacher, who described her impressions like this in 1927:

As a first semester student you needn’t bother even applying for one of the 28 residential studios in the Prellerhaus. The Masters' Council decides on a semester-by-semester basis who can live there, und that will usually be students in the higher semesters and young masters. So to begin with, find yourself somewhere as a sub-let. A little tip – we know from your fellow student Marianne Brandt that the carpet in the gymnasium in the Bauhaus building is used by hard-up students as a place to sleep. There are showers there too.

Life drawing with Paul Klee, painting with Wassily Kandinsky, practical building with Walter Gropius – your grandchildren will still be envying you for all this. Maybe one of these gentlemen will even invite you into his Master House and you’ll be able to sit on the terrace with your idol. With a teacher-student ratio of 1:15, there is at any rate plenty of opportunity to get to know the great masters better – and that is part of the plan.

You’ve probably already heard of the legendary parties. There are a lot of parties at the Bauhaus! Spontaneous ones like this one on the beach, or ones that are planned well in advance like the big fancy dress parties, each with its own theme and planned well ahead under the leadership of Oskar Schlemmer.

Weaving carpets, printing posters or making furniture all day in the workshop – this is not how you may have imagined studying at the avant-garde school of design and architecture. But Gropius has big things in mind for you; he wants you to grow into “a new type of employee for industry and craftsman trades who masters technique and form in equal measure.”

But before you are assigned to a workshop, you have to do the foundation course: called Vorkurs. That lasts two semesters and is compulsory for everyone. Don’t be alarmed if the teacher Josef Albers gives you an old newspaper in the first session and tells you to “make more out of it than is there yet at the moment. I would also like you to respect the material and form it sensibly taking account of its characteristics. If you can do that without using aids such as a knife, scissors or glue, then so much the better. Have fun!”

No exam stress, no marks, and if you don’t want to do an assignment there are no repercussions – sounds good? In fact, the Bauhaus is revolutionising not only design and architecture but also and first and foremost teaching. ‘Learning by doing’ and ‘trial and error’ are two maxims applied to the method of training. And what’s more, care is taken from the very beginning to see that you develop your skills by working on actual projects. Boring it is not.

You are a woman and have no interest at all in textiles? Then it doesn’t look good for you at the moment, because women are mostly packed off to the weaving shop after the foundation course – they are not thought to be up to much. Only a few of your female fellow students have managed to gain admittance to other workshops, and have been more successful there than some of their male fellow students. I’m thinking of Alma Buscher in the carpentry workshop and Marianne Brandt in the metal workshop, for example.

In fact you really can study architecture at the Bauhaus from 1 April 1927 – and that’s no April fool‘s joke. Until then, the Bauhaus did not have its own building department and all building commissions were carried out by Gropius’ firm in Berlin …

You like doing sport – and so you are completely in line with the health trend of your time, with the healthy, active human being as the ideal of the ‘physical culture movement’? You will have plenty of opportunity for movement and exercise. True, sport is not introduced as an official teaching subject until 1928 by Hannes Meyer, but sports teachers are already being appointed now. They are not always needed – you can of course always play football or handball, go running or swim in the nearby Elbe …

Perhaps you will discover not just your passion for design but also for another person at the Bauhaus. It is not unlikely. A lot of couples have already got together here. By the end, at least 70 couples will have come out of the Bauhaus – not to mention the countless love affairs.