10 essential facts about Bauhaus

In 1919, Walter Gropius became the director of a new institution, the Staatliches Bauhaus, also simply known as the Bauhaus, which merged the former Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Even though Gropius was an architect and the term Bauhaus literally translates as "construction house," the school of design did not have an architecture department until 1927.

In a pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition, Gropius stated that his goal was "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Combining influences from modernism, the English Arts and Crafts movement, and Constructivism, Gropius promoted the idea that design was to serve the community.

The most basic principle of the movement of the Bauhaus school was "form follows function." According to this idea, simple but elegant geometric shapes were designed based on the intended function or purpose of a building or an object. Illustrating this concept, the pieces of this chess game designed by Josef Hartwig (1923-24) are stylized to suggest how each of them moves and its rank of power.

The interdisciplinary approach of the school's professors and students meant that visual arts, graphic design, architecture as well as product and furniture design all came into conversation with how people lived in the modern world. They thereby actualized the concept of the "Gesamtkunstwerk," or complete work of art. This photo shows the interior of the Bauhaus school in Dessau.

The school had many major artists among its teachers. This photo from 1926 features, from left to right, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer. Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were also directors of the school.

Although the Bauhaus is associated with minimalist design, students and teachers invested an unsuspected amount of energy in creating surreal costumes for parties, as reported by Farkas Molnar in his 1925 essay, "Life at the Bauhaus." The parties began as improvised events but were later turned into large-scale productions, such as Oskar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet" from 1922 (photo).

Political tensions led to different closures of the school. After being based in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau (picture). When the Nazis gained control of the city council there, the school closed again in 1932 and was reopened in Berlin. It was closed permanently in April 1933, pressured by the Nazi regime, which criticized the institution for producing "degenerate art."

Even though the Bauhaus school was closed, different members of its staff kept spreading its idealistic concepts after they fled Germany. For example, many Jewish architects of the Bauhaus school contributed to the White City of Tel Aviv (picture), where a collection of 4,000 buildings were designed in the Bauhaus style. It is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.

Though today people might most commonly associate modern, affordable, modular furniture with Ikea, the concept wasn't born in Sweden, but rather inspired by the classic works of Bauhaus designers. This photo shows tubular furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930.

The Bauhaus school turns 100 in 2019. Germany's major celebratory program involves not only the three museums housed in the former schools in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin (picture), but also at least 10 of the country's 16 federal states will participate. Expect several exhibitions, events, publications — and even new museums.