Bauhaus at 100: How a Way of Thinking Shaped Modern Life (Part I) | QDaily Business History

This is the second piece in our "Bauhaus at 100" series.

Ah, the non-bourgeois, rational, functionalist, collective, internationalist, industrialized, machine-driven, democratic, geometric-lined, concrete, primary-colored, idealist, German, American, pure, cold, once-bent-on-sweeping-everything-clean — and later co-opted by the stylists, or name-dropped by architecture-loving aesthetes — Bauhaus.

America's postwar hot money, Germany's chaotic self-reconstruction, and the internationalism still lingering after World War I all crashed together to produce, a hundred years ago, "the ideal school of architecture and art."

Then the school hit turbulence, moved, and dissolved. Its core figures scattered across the world, and the threads of modern design spread outward in wider, looser ways.

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius had always cared about housing for ordinary people, and he carried to America a plan for building high-rise apartment blocks for low-income residents. In 1960, also in America, Italian designer Massimo Vignelli and American Ralph E. Eckerstrom both held that European modern graphic design needed to fit more tightly with the rules of the American market. Together they founded Unimark International and produced a number of "American" — or "New York-style" — graphic design landmarks, among them the New York subway map and the Ford Motor Company logo. The movement of people and capital "transplanted" the Bauhaus, and gave it an ever-wider definition.

Whether out of nostalgia for utopian idealism, a critique of American consumerism, or simply a backward glance at Soviet-style workers' housing, the so-called "Bauhaus" has kept surfacing and resurfacing in everyday life over the past hundred years.

The Bauhaus cannot be boiled down to a style. It is more like a way of thinking with a negating edge, built on top of older modes of taste and production. Without understanding what came before, you cannot grasp the shock the Bauhaus delivered to people a century ago. Like "the modern" itself, it draws both lovers and haters. But whatever one makes of it, it has profoundly shaped today's society.

Following the previous piece on its origins, we have gathered 55 traces of the Bauhaus in the world. They are as sprawling as everyday life itself, so we are running them in two parts. You are welcome to add your own.

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1. Arco Lamp by Achille Castiglioni

In 1962, the 44-year-old Italian designer Achille Castiglioni designed a floor lamp: the base is cut from marble, and a slender stem curves in an exaggerated arc that reaches seven feet high, with no extra ornament — yet the lamp itself seems to be one large piece of decoration. Compared with floor lamps from the years just before, its stem was taller, longer, and more sharply curved, conjuring a kind of surreal effect. Hollywood loved it. In 1971, the lamp made its screen debut — with a faintly extraterrestrial air — in the ninth James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever.

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2. Baby Cradle by Peter Keler

In 1923, Bauhaus student Peter Keler designed a baby cradle. Its distinctive feature: within it you can find the basic geometric forms of triangle, circle, and rectangle, along with the three primary colors — red, yellow, and blue. Keler made it for the Bauhaus school's first exhibition. The body of the cradle is a wooden, upturned hollow triangular prism, large enough to seat an adult or hold a sleeping infant. The sides of the prism are red and the base is yellow; each corner of the triangular base carries a blue circle that lets the cradle rock. Keler's design drew heavily on the research into color and form by his Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky.

3. Bachelor's Wardrobe by Josef Pohl

Czech designer Josef Pohl studied at the Bauhaus from 1929 to 1932. In the year he enrolled, he designed a plywood wardrobe whose chief feature was a set of casters that made it easy to move. Beyond that, the interior was carefully and tightly organized: one side could hang clothes, and a shoe compartment was partitioned off on its own. The "bachelor's wardrobe" name came from its practicality and portability.

4. Barcelona Pavilion

The German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World's Fair was designed by Mies van der Rohe. Germany was then in its post-World War I economic recovery and hoped to use architecture to show off the freedom and prosperity of the Weimar Republic.

White and gray dominated the palette, with very little decoration; the whole structure looked more like several rectangular faces joined together. Steel framing, travertine, and translucent glass were the main materials. Set against the reflecting pools around the building, the play of reflections, glass, and rectangle-defined space blurred the line between inside and out. To match this minimalist style, during the exhibition the interior held nothing but a few sculptures and several pieces of furniture designed by Mies — so the building itself became the exhibit, and the show gave full voice to Mies van der Rohe's credo of "less is more."

5. Barcelona Chair

In May 1929, the World's Fair opened in Barcelona, Spain. Inside the German Pavilion designed by Mies van der Rohe stood several chairs he had co-designed — the "Barcelona Chair": chrome-plated legs in a crossed structure, the seat and back cushions sewn from 148 pieces of genuine leather.

Although this armless chair echoed the strong modernist style of the Barcelona Pavilion, it was clearly unlike other strictly functionalist, plain chairs — it carried an aristocratic air, more imposing. The reason: it was made to receive Spain's King Alfonso XIII, which led Mies van der Rohe to decide that "a chair must be monumental — you can't use a kitchen chair." The crossed legs carry a faint hint of a throne.

6. Bauhaus Chess Set

Between 1923 and 1924, German artist Josef Hartwig designed a new, simplified chess set. He stripped out every symbol tied to religion and monarchy, and instead built the pieces from combinations of spheres, cubes, and X-shaped forms — for example, a cube joined to a sphere to stand for the old queen.

7. Bauhaus Vorkurs: The Preliminary Course System

At the Bauhaus school, new students had to complete a six-month foundational preparatory course before being assigned to workshops suited to their aptitude, where they spent about three years in professional workshop training — in metalwork, woodwork, sculpture, printing, weaving, and other trades. After that, students could either go to work or move on to an architecture specialization. Earning a "Bauhaus diploma" usually took four to five years.

The system was meant to stress the unity of art, craft, and technology, and to give students in the preliminary course a grasp of the basic principles of design — to borrow a phrase from Phyllis Shillito, founder of Australia's Shillito Design School (also known as the "Australian Bauhaus"): to be able to "design anything from a dress to a kitchen stove." The preliminary course system has since been widely adopted by art and design schools around the world.

8. The Bauhaus GmbH Product Catalog

In 1929, the Bauhaus launched its own product sales catalog, with product photographs shot by its teachers for shoppers to browse. This was a strikingly forward-looking marketing approach: the first IKEA catalog, published in Swedish, did not appear until 1951, and for a time IKEA treated it as its main marketing tool. Before that, the company sold mostly through mail-order newspaper ads, then used local milk trucks to carry goods to the train station. By 2013, the IKEA catalog had a print run of 208 million copies — about twice the number of Bibles printed in the same period. One key difference from the Bauhaus catalog, though: a large share of IKEA's product images are computer-generated.

9. "Charleston on the Bauhaus Roof" — the photograph

In 1927, Lux Feininger — a Bauhaus student who liked to wander with a camera — caught a candid shot on the roof of the school building: a couple playing music and dancing the Charleston, frozen in an unusually lively, free, theatrical moment. He titled it "Charleston on the Bauhaus Roof." Smaller cameras and faster exposures were at the time opening up new, nimble possibilities for photographers' experiments. Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy urged students to shoot ordinary scenes from unfamiliar angles; he believed a camera could reveal an outside world the human eye alone could not capture, and he coined the phrase "new vision." Lux Feininger was one of his students.

Twenty-five years later, in 1952, French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson used the phrase "the decisive moment" to describe documentary photography. He held that the photographer's act of building and creating an image stops existing the instant the shutter is pressed — that "the second you shoot is the creative moment."

10. Black Mountain College

Founded in 1933 and lasting only twenty-four years, Black Mountain College nonetheless poured out a remarkable run of avant-garde art, music, poetry, and dance during its short life. Its rival at the time was the school founded by Hans Hofmann; both profoundly shaped the flourishing American arts of the late 1960s.

Among Black Mountain College's principal founders were Josef and Anni Albers, the Bauhaus couple who had fled to America in 1933. The school's defining trait was its experimentalism: no exams, students set their own courses and proportions, and the old hierarchy between teachers and students was overturned. Visual art and music sat at the core of the program. Music teacher John Cage staged his first piece of music theater there — Theater Piece No. 1 (1952) — pioneering minimalist music marked by the absence of sound during performance.

11. "Blue Bauhaus Cards" Wallpaper Series

In 1930, the wallpaper company Rasch and the Bauhaus school collaborated on the first Bauhaus wallpaper series, "Blue Bauhaus Cards," offered in 14 different solid colors. Run your fingers over the paper and you could feel a clear texture. For the first time, customers had an alternative to the floral wallpaper of their grandmothers' late-nineteenth-century parlors. Over the next few years, these solid-color wallpapers became a huge commercial success, selling 6 million rolls. The company — Rasch — is still making them today.

12. Braun SK4 Radio and Apple Products

In 1956, German electronics company Braun released the SK4 radio-phonograph: a vacuum-tube radio combined with a turntable on top, in a casing of metal, glass, and wood.

One of its designers was Hans Gugelot, a teacher at the Ulm School of Design — West Germany's "New Bauhaus" — which argued for turning modern design into a new profession involved directly in making products. The collaboration with Braun was a key move by the school. The SK4's design vision was to make the radio light and flexible rather than a heavy piece of furniture: less wood, more metal and glass.

Braun's chief industrial designer at the time, Dieter Rams, also worked on the product. His work was typically clean and smooth, with few buttons and simple lines — a design language that would go on to deeply influence Apple products.

13. Butterfly Stool

In 1954, the Butterfly Stool by Japanese designer Yanagi Sori was unveiled. It is strikingly simple: two sheets of plywood bent into a "7" shape are screwed together at the fold, with a brass rod underneath for support, recalling the shape of butterfly wings. For the designer this was an unusual problem — Japanese tradition still favored resting on tatami mats, so folding traditional materials and taste into a stool mattered. The Butterfly Stool did exactly that; some have even linked its curved, flowing lines to the torii gates of Japanese shrines.

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14. Charles and Ray Eames and the LCM Chair

American designer Charles Eames and his wife, Ray Eames, designed a series of minimalist, brightly colored modern chairs. The LCM (Lounge Chair Metal), first produced in 1946, has a clean chrome-steel frame and two separate sheets of plywood — one for the seat, one for the back — joined by rubber shock mounts. Using two separate panels rather than a single piece was the most direct way to save material and cut weight, and the result looks clean and uncluttered.

When designing chairs, the couple usually worked with plywood and plastics — materials that hold their shape, stay strong, and stay light. Simple silhouettes and clearly separated parts made mass production easier, and wide popularity followed as a matter of course.

15. Chromed Floor Lamp by Robert Slezak

In the 1930s, Czech designer Robert Slezak designed a floor lamp with a milky-white glass shade, a glass side table, and a tubular steel stem. The Czech furniture company Slezak himself founded — Slezakovy závody — has run since 1908 and still makes a range of practical furniture defined by its tubular lines and metal construction, billing itself as "Czech functionalism."

16. Cylinda Series Stainless Steel Tableware

In the 1960s, Danish architect Arne Emil Jacobsen introduced a set of stainless steel tea pieces "with no ornament at all," bringing geometric metal products into mass production. In 1957, Jacobsen had also designed a series of minimalist stainless steel flatware — flat in appearance, seen as a vision of the future for its "clean, precise" lines. Stanley Kubrick, at least, agreed: in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), this flatware appears beside an astronaut eating inside the spacecraft.

D

27. "Der Schlag gegen das Bauhaus" — the photomontage

A photomontage is a collage made of photographs. This 1932 work, "Der Schlag gegen das Bauhaus" ("The Strike Against the Bauhaus"), ran in the Japanese architecture journal Kokusai Kenchiku (International Architecture) and was designed by Bauhaus's Japanese student Yamawaki Iwao. He used the photomontage's capacity for unexpected displacement to express his fury at Nazi rule.

The work was published shortly before the Bauhaus was forced to close under Nazi pressure. In the image, three men in boots and uniforms enter from the upper right, trampling the Bauhaus Dessau building as they survey the scene with arrogant authority. From the lower left, a group of Bauhaus men and women burst in, some with clenched fists, conveying rage. The man with the upturned mustache and round glasses is Alfred Hugenberg — the media-empire mogul who served under Hitler and held absolute media power between the two world wars.

18. Door Knob by Walter Gropius

The modern door handle designed by Bauhaus founder Gropius went into mass production for the first time in 1923. Made for a German factory in Alfeld, the design has an industrial character: the handle is nickel-plated brass, with a cranked square shank and a cylindrical grip sleeve. The manufacturer, Izé, still makes it today; according to Izé, it is the most commercially successful product in Bauhaus history.

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19. Fagus Factory

The Fagus Factory, in Alfeld, Lower Saxony, Germany, is a ten-story complex designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius for the manufacture and storage of shoe lasts by the Fagus company. Gropius made inventive use of vast glass walls to bring more daylight to the workers inside; heavy load-bearing columns gave way to a steel-frame structure, and the corner columns on the facades were removed entirely. "Utility" and "transparency" became the building's keywords. It was the work that made Gropius's name, and it is regarded as a landmark of modernist architecture.

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20. General Panel Corporation and Prefabricated, Standardized Construction

In 1942, Bauhaus founder Gropius co-founded the General Panel Corporation in the United States to promote the use of prefabricated concrete panels assembled into houses. The panels were made to standardized dimensions with uniform connectors, interchangeable across different buildings. The method was widely used in postwar America in the 1960s; today, nearly one-third of detached houses in the United States are built this way (figures from The Bauhaus Way: History, Legacy, the World, and China).

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21. "Haus am Horn" and the First Bauhaus Exhibition

One of the spaces at the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 was a white house shaped like a coffee grinder. The "Haus am Horn" had a flat roof, white walls, and a reinforced concrete structure. Its contents included designed products, furnishings, and kitchen items — all for sale, all made by Bauhaus teachers and students in the workshops. What struck visitors as especially new was the kitchen: integrated cabinetry held matching tea sets and coffeepots in neat order; even the bathroom was standardized. Each white room had an almost perfectly defined function.

Director Gropius saw the exhibition as a major marketing chance. He wanted to send the public a message: architecture and consumer goods could be functional and reproducible. Germany's unprecedented inflation of 1922 had made handcrafted production far too expensive, and the Bauhaus resolved to try mass production. To meet the demands of its patron, the Thuringian state parliament, the school held its first large-scale exhibition in 1923, showing three years of design and production.

22. Herbert Bayer's "Universal" Typeface

Harvard Art Museums in the United States holds a manuscript of an alphabet — a 1927 draft by Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus student and later teacher, exploring a "universal" typeface, even though the typeface was not yet in universal use at the time.

The letterforms have the regularity of geometric shapes; within each one you can find a tidy semicircle, quarter-circle, or long rectangle. The lowercase "x" looks like two back-to-back semicircles; "b," "d," "q," and "p" are full circles with vertical strokes; "e" and "c" seem one stroke short of complete circles. The letters end with no decorative serifs — they look bare. A single red, eye-catching lowercase "d" is written off to the right on its own, taking up nearly a quarter of the space; the complete alphabet is written in black.

23. Helvetica

In 1957, two Swiss designers made a quiet sans-serif typeface meant to work "like a transparent container" — putting the text forward rather than the letterform itself. They named it "Helvetica," Latin for "Swiss." The typeface has since been revised twice and remains one of the most widely used in the world: you can find it on the Microsoft logo, in the subway systems of New York and Washington, on iOS 8, and on television remote controls. New York designer Cyrus Highsmith once tried to spend "a day without Helvetica," and found he could barely move.

24. High-Rise Residential Buildings

Gropius had always cared about housing for ordinary people, and he proposed high-rise apartment blocks as a solution for the working class. In 1930, he gave a lecture in Belgium titled "Low, Medium, or High-Rise Buildings", arguing that high-rise apartment buildings could "provide more open space, sunlight, air, and informal social contact" and so suited low-income residents, while villas on the city's edge suited high-income ones. According to The Bauhaus Way: History, Legacy, the World, and China, he carried these convictions with him to Harvard, believing it was necessary to "create new architecture for a new age." The functional, universal qualities of Bauhaus architecture took root in America this way.

25. HSBC Hong Kong Logo

In 1983, Hong Kong graphic designer Henry Steiner designed the red-and-white hexagonal logo for HSBC Hong Kong. By Steiner's account, the logo drew on the bank's symbol — a red-and-white St. Andrew's Cross flag. The mark "resembles a compass pointing in different directions, signifying transactions from all four corners of the world, lending a hand to the Group's rapid growth." Steiner studied at Yale University under Paul Rand — of the "New York school" of graphic design, designer of the IBM and ABC logos — and under Herbert Bayer, designer of the "universal" typeface.

We will present another 30 Bauhaus designs in the next piece.

The banner image is "Charleston on the Bauhaus Roof," a photograph by Lux Feininger. The header image is a poster from the first Bauhaus exhibition, image from Pinterest.