Bauhaus at 100: Why a School and a Style Emerged in Postwar Europe | QDaily Business History

We are publishing three articles in this series. This is the first.

Bauhaus turns 100 this year. Things look different from the 50th anniversary, when the movement's two most important figures, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had just died and no one was sure how to sum them up. A century on, T Magazine, published by The New York Times, can say flatly that Bauhaus "remains one of the most transcendent and maddening movements of the modernist era." Functionalism, minimalism, "a more cosmopolitan design sensibility" — no one doubts that these words belong with Bauhaus.

At the start of the year, Bauhaus unveiled its official centenary logo. Two new Bauhaus museums open this year in Dessau and Weimar, the school's two main homes. Berlin, where it briefly operated, is planning a new Bauhaus archive. Alongside centenary events in cities all year long, the German National Tourist Board calls Germany "the birthplace of modernism" — a draw for cultural tourists.

The design world's wish to honor its forebears is easy to understand. The Berlin design collective Savy Contemporary built a "Bauhaus Bus" and plans to take it on a four-city world tour. The bus is a miniature of the Bauhaus Dessau building, glass-curtain grid facade and all. The Australian design company 99designs ran a competition to redesign logos in the Bauhaus style, hoping to help answer the question of "how Bauhaus standards persist after all this time."

It is hard to say when a single movement was last honored with such fanfare. Bauhaus is genuinely unusual.

What is Bauhaus? There are several answers.

It was an ideal school of architecture and art. Some hold that its finest hour was April 1, 1919, when the founding director, Gropius, read out a utopian manifesto: he would build an entirely new institution in pursuit of a "new unity" of craft, art, and technology. The Bauhaus pedagogy was unlike anything before it, and it celebrated working in common.

Others were drawn to it because it stood for a wish to remake society. In its early years, Bauhaus was known for its anti-bourgeois stance. Its second director, Hannes Meyer, famously declared that Bauhaus would serve "the needs of the people, not the needs of luxury." Later, the school's socialist character became one of the Nazis' chief reasons for opposing it.

But Bauhaus is most celebrated for its functionalist design philosophy — a vision sharply at odds with its image in the first few years, yet the one that turned Bauhaus into a brand, not just a school. That brand championed industrialization and mass production, and it became a pillar of the modernist movement.

The answers go further still. We want to talk about the early Bauhaus: it bears not only on what came after, but on the age that produced it.

1

When it was founded in 1919, Bauhaus was a state school combining art, craft, and architecture. For nearly thirteen years the Weimar government funded it — a provisional government set up in the wreckage of war. On November 11, 1918, France and Germany signed an armistice in a railway carriage at Compiègne, France, formally ending the First World War. Germany had lost. Everything was in ruins.

Germany had entered the war in a mood of rising optimism. Before 1914, it had been deliberately challenging the dominance of Britain and France, and a military and political standoff had taken shape. The assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke in Sarajevo was merely the spark that set off this international conflict.

In the design world, the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) was founded before the war. State-funded and hugely ambitious, it embodied a newly industrializing nation's fresh grasp of the factors of capitalist production. The plan was to ally with entrepreneurs; at the outset, twelve architects and twelve companies took part. The German government hoped to fuse traditional craftsmanship with large-scale industrial production techniques, so that Germany could compete with Britain and the United States.

Bauhaus can be read as a continuation of the Deutscher Werkbund. It was born in 1918 after the war ended, growing out of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, with Gropius appointed director (the later Hannes Meyer episode showed that the mayor kept the power to dismiss the director). And Mies van der Rohe, Bauhaus's last director, had served as the Werkbund's chief architect.

In 2007, Sotheby's held an auction called "From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus." The lots included modernist porcelain plates, brass candlesticks, and brass kettles. The catalogue stated: "The goal is for every German design — from silverware and glass to furniture and ceramics, from household appliances and advertising graphics to exhibition design and architecture — to represent Germanic quality." Every dimension of design at once: is that not exactly the ideal Gropius had in mind when he founded Bauhaus? It is precisely how he later organized the school's departments.

Gropius himself, though, held no strong nationalist feeling. He was single-mindedly devoted to the purity of art and design. In the first three years after the war, Bauhaus was deeply utopian — workshop-like, and steeped in mysticism and Expressionism. The woodcut print of the Bauhaus manifesto was Expressionist; the early leading instructors Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were figures of Expressionism. So too was the Sommerfeld House (Haus Sommerfeld), commissioned in 1920.

The shift came around 1923. Art historians usually credit the influence of the Dutch De Stijl movement. Theo van Doesburg, associated with De Stijl, came to Weimar twice — in 1921 and 1922. Those conversations and lectures seem to have struck like a thunderbolt. Gropius decided to change direction. He still believed that "mechanized work is lifeless, fit only for lifeless machines," yet he chose to work with German industry — as the Deutscher Werkbund had done — in order to sell what Bauhaus was making.

He proposed that design should grow through industrialization. This brought Bauhaus closer to the version people know today: rationalist, functionalist.

Behind the shift lay an important backdrop: Germany's dire economy around 1923, and the urgent hunger for postwar reconstruction.

After Germany's defeat, the Treaty of Versailles demanded huge reparations. "By January 1921, some eighteen months after the treaty was signed, Germany had delivered goods worth 20 billion marks, though the Allies claimed those goods were worth only 8 billion. As punishment, they occupied more of Germany's industrial centers using German money, and levied special tariffs on German goods imported by the Allied nations. … The trade surplus with Germany kept growing, while Germany was also required to deliver fixed annual amounts of cash and commodities such as coal toward a total of 32 billion marks. … Meanwhile, Germany's wealthiest capitalists were indifferent to their country's fate and moved their investments abroad, deepening the misery of the German people." (From Dawn to Decadence)

Unemployment topped 6 percent in early 1919. Efforts to bring it down had some effect — and, as a consequence, brought the hyperinflation of 1923.

In 1924, Bauhaus took part in the Leipzig Trade Fair in Germany. The show won Bauhaus both renown and controversy. But the practical problem was still money and capacity: when dozens of European manufacturers placed orders with Bauhaus, limited equipment and funds meant not all could be filled.

Without the huge loans extended by American bankers after 1924 — and the speeches everywhere urging Germans to be thrifty (Germany's reparations agent-general Seymour Parker Gilbert demanded that Germans stop borrowing abroad, work hard, save, balance their budgets, and if necessary lower their standard of living until the reparations obligation was met) — those modernist silverware pieces would probably never have reached shop windows across Germany. Nor would there have been Mies van der Rohe's much-praised 1927 Stuttgart housing exhibition. Because that exhibition was such a success, the German government commissioned Mies van der Rohe in 1929 to design the German Pavilion at the Barcelona World Exposition.

The United States proposed the Dawes Plan in 1924. It met opposition at home, where hostility toward Germany ran strong. German-Americans were the largest ethnic group in the country, and they were doing their best to avoid any tie to Germany and German customs; German-language schools were closing in large numbers. But President Wilson — forever invoking "making the world safe for peace" and "spreading democracy globally" — pressed on, partly because Germany's failure to pay reparations would also impair France's ability to repay its debts to the United States.

The Dawes Plan brought a series of economic reforms for Germany and set a more manageable annual reparations schedule. Crucially, it provided Germany with a series of large-scale loans. The first loan totaled 800 million marks, half of it supplied by American bankers.

Where would the money go? William C. McNeil, in his 1988 book American Money and the Weimar Republic: Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression (Political Economy of International Change), noted that conservative German heavy-industry and agrarian interests tended to favor "productive" investment in private enterprise, while "socialists" preferred public investment — municipal gas works, power plants, public housing, state-run production cooperatives, and mining. In the end, the loans went mainly into the industrial sector.

Gropius made a choice for Bauhaus. Between 1928 and 1930, through commercial partnerships, the school turned a profit.

In 1925, Gropius himself published International Architecture. "In it he championed an architecture unconstrained by specific site conditions. He urged architects to free their designs from the limitations of site, climate, local character, and historical tradition, and not to dilute the design's strict adherence to rational process." (Fallingwater Rising) An international style rooted in reason and function was taking shape.

In 1925, the school moved to Dessau, where Gropius designed the new Bauhaus building — later regarded as the quintessential example of Bauhaus architecture.

In Dessau, Bauhaus was buffeted by political change. The newly empowered Nazi government saw Bauhaus as a hotbed of Jews and Marxists (the second director, Hannes Meyer, genuinely was a Marxist — he was later dismissed by the mayor of Weimar) and pressed the school in 1932. By then Mies van der Rohe had become Bauhaus's third director; he moved the school to an abandoned factory in Berlin and turned it into a private institution. A year later, on April 11, Mies van der Rohe arrived to find his workplace surrounded by police.

Bauhaus closed. The Weimar Republic that had supported it ended that same year. But Bauhaus as a movement was only beginning to make itself felt.

2

How distinctive was Bauhaus at the time? Not very, in truth.

As early as the 1890s, European architects were already calling for new styles, championing minimalism, and trying out industrial components. Among building types, factories were the first to change their look. Albert Kahn, the "architect of Detroit," belonged to the generation of Germans who had emigrated to America one generation earlier. In the early twentieth century, he used reinforced-concrete frame structures and large glass windows to build factories that went up fast and cheap, and became the model for the modern factory. Before that, factories were built of brick and stone.

But Kahn was only a factory designer — he stopped at factories. Demand for this kind of design in other fields was nowhere near as urgent as in industry. It was the next generation of designers — Gropius, Mies, and their like — who, after the First World War, applied the industrial aesthetic to housing and school buildings without hesitation. (Gropius's Bauhaus building itself carried on the style he had set out in his 1911 Fagus Factory.) By then cities had an urgent need to rebuild, and people were pouring in to live and to spend — packed nearly as tight as a factory floor.

Germany was no island of design revolution after the First World War. The push for industrialization and functionalism was under way in postwar France too. Le Corbusier praised industry more directly than any member of Bauhaus. "Industry, like a flood rolling towards its destiny, is bringing us the new tools that suit this new epoch animated by a new spirit," he wrote in Toward a New Architecture, published in 1923 (that year again!), a book that caused a sensation the moment it appeared.

Le Corbusier was elated because a plan "to build 500,000 houses of good quality at low cost in France" had just won approval. He called it "an unusual event in the history of architecture" — one that "cannot be treated in a conventional way."

"The prosperity of industry in our time has produced a special class — the intellectual worker, a numerous and very active social stratum. … In production workshops, technical departments, research institutions, banks and large department stores, newspaper offices and magazine offices, there are engineers, department heads, legal representatives, secretaries, editors, accountants, and so on. … These people too have the right to demand a machine for living in — a plain, humane demand." Le Corbusier's "intellectual workers" line up closely with what we would later call the middle class.

The picture grows even clearer set against The New York Times's reporting at the time on French reconstruction. After the First World War, American companies signed large numbers of construction contracts in France. American contractors brought large-scale building methods that worked well for a France severely short of labor and industrial capacity after the war. A New York Times report dated July 11, 1920 noted that the French estimated that without new construction techniques, the available workforce would need more than twenty years to rebuild the devastated regions.

New building techniques let what Gropius called "international architecture" spread across Europe. As some observers have noted, without the early work of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Gropius would not have mastered the cantilever technique. And now a postwar international style had emerged.

A 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York presented "International Style" architecture dating from 1922. Gropius and Mies were of course included, but so were many others, spread across Europe and including Americans. The style, as its name suggested, was not uniquely German, nor did it have to come from Germany.

One of the curators, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, was an architectural historian who had recently graduated from Harvard. The other, Philip Johnson, was the curator of MoMA's architecture department. More than a decade later, Johnson would become one of the most influential architects in America, building the famous Glass House and the AT&T Building. The two young men toured European buildings and architects, came home, coined the term "International Style," and named the exhibition "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition." The show then toured the United States for six years. To accompany it, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 was later published.

By now the essential traits of the International Style were coming into focus: an emphasis on volume, a preference for lightweight, mass-produced industrial materials, less ornament and color, repetitive modular units, and broad use of flat surfaces and glass. This style would of course go on to sweep the globe, and from it our basic aesthetic of modern architecture was formed.

The rise of internationalism as an aesthetic style fit the cosmopolitan leanings of most European intellectuals and artists of the time. There is no need to overstate the cosmopolitan mood of the era — we all know that political nationalism reached a critical pitch just before the First World War broke out, and that some universalist movements failed. In the sciences, the metric movement swept Europe in the 1880s, only to be resisted by Britain and the United States. The British historian Mark Mazower, in Governing the World, observed that the course of science in the nineteenth century did not bear out the claim that "science has no borders." Especially after 1918, many international forums effectively barred German scientists.

But for a quick sketch of the intellectual climate of the time, a passage from From Dawn to Decadence is instructive: "The internationalist spirit remained strong, kept alive by the constant travel of individuals between capitals." "The whole of the West rejoiced in a vibrant common culture, nourished by continuous exchange, flourishing beyond national borders and other material interests." Stefan Zweig felt it too. He described the people of Vienna — not merely Europeans — as having been formed, almost without knowing it, into "supranationalists, cosmopolitans, citizens of the world."

The 1932 MoMA exhibition included Jacobus Oud from the Netherlands. He is generally tied to the Dutch De Stijl movement — the very De Stijl mentioned in the previous section as having turned Gropius around.

Like Bauhaus, the De Stijl movement reached beyond architecture; it was part of a broader artistic current that drew in painters, designers, writers, and critics. It was a response to the Expressionism and "modern Baroque" of the Amsterdam School. The Netherlands had stayed neutral in the First World War, and for a time the war had cut the Dutch off from the rest of Europe. Fortunately, prewar exchanges kept bearing fruit. Piet Cornelies Mondrian — the popular abstract painter known for his grid paintings — had moved to Paris in 1912. When the war broke out he was in the Netherlands and could not return to Paris; he became one of the founding participants of the De Stijl movement. De Stijl painting and architecture sought simplicity and abstraction, using squares, rectangles, and straight lines in black, white, gray, red, yellow, and blue.

In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, Oud began serving as the city's public housing architect in 1918. At the time, Rotterdam was taking in a large influx of workers, which led Jacobus Oud to spend most of his time on socially reformist housing projects. His architectural style in those years was rigorous and rational; the priority was using scientifically efficient construction methods to cut costs, rather than tending to the psychological needs or aesthetic hopes of residents.

Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, when "International Style" and "modernism" were at their height, Oud bristled at the labels attached to him. In a sense, this confirmed that his early work in that vein had been a product of specific circumstances.

Similar groups were springing up everywhere, their influences tangled together. In Russia, Constructivism arose in 1913. It is thought to have shaped both De Stijl and Bauhaus. There, new art and architectural forms joined with social reform — the aim was to build a more open and transparent society. The social function of art was stressed to the utmost, and artists and designers took part in the Bolshevik government's public propaganda after the October Revolution. The most famous example was Vladimir Tatlin's "Tower" (also known as the Monument to the Third International). Its searchlights and projection screens embodied a machine aesthetic and celebrated technology. Germans responded warmly to Tatlin's design; some proclaimed that "art is dead, long live Tatlin's machine art." But for lack of funds, Tatlin's Tower was never built.

3

Right up to the 1932 MoMA exhibition, the two Bauhaus architects — Gropius and Mies van der Rohe — had not yet been presented as a distinct movement. They were treated as peers of other modernist and International Style architects — at most somewhat more prominent.

Within Bauhaus itself, architecture had at first been just one of the school's directions. The architecture program was not set up until 1927, and only after Mies van der Rohe became director of Bauhaus in the 1930s did architecture's weight within the school grow substantially. "Bauhaus nearly became an architecture school." (Although the word "Bauhaus" literally means "building house," for Gropius "architecture" did not refer to the construction industry as such.) Mies is of course a major figure of modernism and functionalism; his most famous formulation is "less is more." In the German Pavilion Mies designed for the Barcelona World Exposition, modern elements — the "floating" roof, marble cladding, and expanses of glass — all stand out.

In the 1930s, though, Mies van der Rohe was getting very few commissions, partly because the Nazis thought him "un-German" — even as he was still competing in 1933 for the design of a new Nazi state bank.

As the Nazis consolidated power, large numbers of German intellectuals and artists fled to the United States in the mid-to-late 1930s, among them many Bauhaus instructors and students.

Philip Johnson — the curator who had been the first to take European modernist architecture seriously in America, though a controversial Nazi sympathizer — helped considerably. He aided their move to America, helped them find early commissions, and helped them gain footholds at several important design schools. The exception was the avowed "Marxist" Hannes Meyer, who went to the Soviet Union. Gropius spent a brief stint in England in 1934, then emigrated to the United States in 1937 to chair the Harvard architecture department. Mies van der Rohe arrived in America the same year to teach at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Also in 1937, László Moholy-Nagy founded the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago.

Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House that "young architects prostrated themselves at his (Gropius's) feet, and some (like Philip Johnson) had not risen decades later." Johnson became a student of Gropius and fellow Bauhaus alumnus Marcel Breuer at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1941. For many years afterward, his work bore the unmistakable imprint of Mies van der Rohe — including the famous Glass House. Johnson made no effort to hide it.

By this point, Bauhaus was no longer just a school — it had become a movement, a symbol of the modern, and nothing suited capitalist America better. From time to time, of course, critics attacked it for betraying its anti-bourgeois founding principles (the criticism peaked in 1949 when Marcel Breuer exhibited a house in MoMA's sculpture garden) or for making grandiose theoretical claims.

Others looked back with longing to Gropius's early utopian ideals and the Bauhaus that existed before it embraced industrialization and mass production. For a time, Bauhaus did not have an entirely smooth reception in America either. Fallingwater Rising records the long dominance of conservative American architects: in the 1930s, "some municipal authorities actually issued orders prohibiting the construction of modern-style houses, and banks became notorious for refusing to extend mortgages on them."

The Expressionist style, opposed to functionalism and the International Style, had not vanished; nor had the classical — both remained powerful. They had simply changed.

"The fact is that in the years between the two world wars, the divergence between the two camps — traditionalists and progressives — seemed less sharp. … Both were familiar with improved mechanical systems (heating, ventilation, refrigeration), and both were capable of using steel, glass, and reinforced concrete." (Fallingwater Rising) The source of that influence is plain enough. Bauhaus became the representative of those influences — even though, at the start, it had been just one strain among many.

Later, its industrial mass production, its spare aesthetic, and its conviction that "everything ought to be designed" became hallmarks of capitalist consumer culture. Ernst Gombrich, in The Story of Art, pointed out that the postwar "stylistic reaction," along with the use of newly invented materials and new ways of working old ones, was bound up with industrialization and commodification. This helps explain both the emergence of Bauhaus and why the style it came to represent grew ever more popular.

"This was the deep conviction of some of the gifted young people of the 1920s. They eagerly absorbed whatever was new and startling. … They had lived through the horrors of war, a war caused by their stupid or wicked elders. A new life would have to discard all old mistakes and be full of new joys." So Gombrich wrote.

He also mentioned the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925. Planned for 1915, the exposition had been delayed ten years by the war.

The timing could not have been more apt. The event "not only changed the public's expectations of furniture, but turned design into a new profession … a profession whose members served the commercial world and decided the shape of all the objects in it, from scent bottles to computers, from vacuum cleaners to bathroom fittings. … In the end, the outer packaging of the objects bought came to matter more than what was inside them."

Cover image from the graphic novel Mies by Spanish illustrator and author Agustín Ferrer Casas.

In the next installment, we will present a fuller entry on Bauhaus — through which you will understand every dimension of Bauhaus as a style, and see how design became industrialized and commercialized.