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I CT OG U P D Y S RO US T T AR .1 IN UHA E Y A ST N B A . IO L 2 S E LU TH C 3. ON C . 4
Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
INTRODUCTION 4
1919: Russian Constructivism, an artictic and architectural philosophy had a major impact on graphic design and other fields.
The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). In the same year Weimar Republic which was the federal republic and semi- presidential representative democracy was established in the city of Weimar. Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living. The following giant facts that loomed over the founding of the Bauhaus in 1919: • World War I, 1914-1918. The War killed some two million Germans, and left Germany’s economy -- then the world’s second largest -- in shambles. The conflict had begun in 1914 with substantial workingclass support, on all sides. It ended with German soldiers in revolt against their officers, and a deep hatred of the leaders who had initiated the hostilities. Many Bauhaus students were veterans of the war. Walter Gropius, its first director, served on the Western Front, was wounded, and won two Iron Crosses. •
The Russian Revolution of 1917. Growing out of war fatigue, a successful Marxist-led revolution on Germany’s doorstep overthrew a much-loathed Czar and replaced him, for heroic moments, with history’s most far-ranging experiment in worker-run government (soon to be strangled by civil war and reaction). The Russian example ignited a wide-spread enthusiasm for social experiment and revolutionary politics, in Germany and elsewhere.
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The German Revolution of 1918. In November, the discredited German Kaiser fled the country; the German Empire became the German Republic. Inspired by the October Revolution, the next months saw the “Spartacus Uprising,” ended with the murder of the left’s most popular speaker, Karl Liebknecht, and its most capable thinker, Rosa Luxemburg. In February, Freikorps troops used artillery and mass arrests to crush the workers movement in Bremen, on the northwest coast, and the Ruhr, in the west, then went into central Germany to liquidate various organs of popular power. In March, there was another upheaval in Berlin. In April, Bavaria declared itself an independent “Soviet Republic” under workers rule, and was violently put down (becoming subsequently the cradle of Nazism).
Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, on June 28, 1919, as a blatant injustice.
These formed the backdrop for the birth of the Bauhaus. Imagine: Walter Gropius issued the Bauhaus Manifesto in April 1919, when the hope in the new ultra-democratic structures was still running hot, when the postwar economic chaos was acute, when class war was an inescapable fact -- Weimar, where the Bauhaus was to have its home, had recently been sealed off for a radius of 10 kilometers by the government, to secure it against the left! The Bauhaus combined elements of both fine arts and design education. The curriculum commenced with a preliminary course that immersed the students, who came from a diverse range of social and educational backgrounds, in the study of materials, color theory, and formal relationships in preparation for more specialized studies. This preliminary course was often taught by visual artists, including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky (1866– 1944), and Josef Albers, among others.
German Revolution (1918-19)
The Werkbund Exhibition of Expressionist Architecture was held in Berlin in 1919
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Following their immersion in Bauhaus theory, students entered specialized workshops, which included metalworking, cabinetmaking, weaving, pottery, typography, and wall painting. Although Gropius’ initial aim was a unification of the arts through craft, aspects of this approach proved financially impractical. While maintaining the emphasis on craft, he repositioned the goals of the Bauhaus in 1923, stressing the importance of designing for mass production. It was at this time that the school adopted the slogan “Art into Industry.” In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school. This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio, classroom, and administrative space for maximum efficiency and spatial logic.
Rabindranath Tagore in Weimar (1921)
The cabinetmaking workshop was one of the most popular at the Bauhaus. Under the direction of Marcel Breuer from 1924 to 1928, this studio reconceived the very essence of furniture, often seeking to dematerialize conventional forms such as chairs to their minimal existence. Breuer theorized that eventually chairs would become obsolete, replaced by supportive columns or air. Inspired by the extruded steel tubes of his bicycle, he experimented with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible metal chairs. Some of these chairs were deployed in the theater of the Dessau building.
In 1921, Rabindranath Tagore visits Weimar after which in 1922 an exhibition of Bauhaus paintings by the Indian Society of Oriental Art (ISOA) was held in Calcutta .
The textile workshop, especially under the direction of designer and weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), created abstract textiles suitable for use in Bauhaus environments. Students studied color theory and design as well as the technical aspects of weaving. Stölzl encouraged experimentation with unorthodox materials, including cellophane, fiberglass, and metal. Fabrics from the weaving workshop were commercially successful, providing vital and much needed funds to the Bauhaus. The studio’s textiles, along with architectural wall painting, adorned the interiors of Bauhaus buildings, providing polychromatic yet abstract visual interest to these somewhat severe spaces. While the weaving studio was primarily comprised of women, this was in part due to the fact that they were discouraged from participating in other areas. The workshop trained a number of prominent textile artists, including Anni Albers (1899–1994), who continued to create and write about modernist textiles throughout her life. Metalworking was another popular workshop at the Bauhaus and, along with the cabinetmaking studio, was the most successful in developing design prototypes for mass production. In this studio, designers such
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as Marianne Brandt, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, and Christian Dell (1893–1974) created beautiful, modern items such as lighting fixtures and tableware. Occasionally, these objects were used in the Bauhaus campus itself; light fixtures designed in the metalwork shop illuminated the Bauhaus building and some faculty housing. Brandt was the first woman to attend the metalworking studio, and replaced Låszló Moholy-Nagy as studio director in 1928. Many of her designs became iconic expressions of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Her sculptural and geometric silver and ebony teapot, while never mass-produced, reflects both the influence of her mentor, MoholyNagy, and the Bauhaus emphasis on industrial forms. It was designed with careful attention to functionality and ease of use, from the nondrip spout to the heat-resistant ebony handle.
In the 1920s, Brick was used in Expressionist architecture to express the inherent nature of the material.
The typography workshop, while not initially a priority of the Bauhaus, became increasingly important under figures like Moholy-Nagy and the graphic designer Herbert Bayer. At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all. Concurrently, typography became increasingly connected to corporate identity and advertising. The promotional materials prepared for the Bauhaus at the workshop, with their use of sans serif typefaces and the incorporation of photography as a key graphic element, served as visual symbols of the avant-garde institution.
Bauhaus Dessau building.
The Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, has been compared to Bauhaus.
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Moholy-Nagy, Title page of: “Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923”, 1923, Letterpress print. Moholy Nagy
BAUHAUS TYPOGRAPHY 8
At first, practical fields of type applicationapplication were restricted to small, miscellaneous printed matters. With the appointment of Moholy-Nagy in 1923, new ideas about the use of typography came to the Bauhaus. Nagy considered typography to be primarily a communications medium, and was concerned with the “clarity of the message in its most emphatic form.” He combined text and photography into interrelated compositions of pure communication he named “Typofoto.”
Bauhaus Exhibition Poster by Joost Schmidt (1893–1948)
By 1925, most of the architects including Gropius along with other expressionists in visual arts moved towards a New Objectivity movement
Plakatstil, “poster style” in German, an early style of poster design began in the early 20th century, using bold, straight fonts with very simple designs, in contrast to Art Nouveau posters.
Joost Schmidt received his degree in painting in 1914 at the GrossherzoglichSächsische Kunstgewerbeschule (Grand Ducal Saxonian school of arts and crafts) in Weimar. “Within the scope of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus Dessau, all students were required to attend two semesters of the lettering design course taught by Schmidt. Here, Schmidt explored the structure of letters —circle, square and rectangle—and their flexibility in terms of shape and size as well as the treatment of color and surface. In addition, he had his students examine aspects of advertising such as language, visual effect, psychology and economy. With his teaching, Joost Schmidt strove for the comprehensive reform of lettering, which was to be validated and standardized internationally.”
In 1925 Adolf Hitler makes his first appearance after being released from jail.
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Bauhaua poster designed by Herbert Bayer (1900 - 1995)
TYPOGRAPHY: DRUCK & REKLAME 10
Austrian Herbert Bayer was trained in the Art Nouveau style but soon was converted by the Bauhaus-Manifest. He enrolled in and studied at the Bauhaus for four years and, after passing his final examination, Bayer was appointed by the Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius, to head the new “Druck und Reklame” (printing and advertising) workshop in Dessau. “Under Bayer’s charge, the newly installed workshop developed into a professional studio for graphic design and commercial art. The study of the communicative potential of letterforms and typographic layout was part of a basic curriculum in the mechanics of visual education. Such innovations as the elimination of capital letters, and the replacement of the archaic Gothic alphabet used in German printing by a modern “cosmopolitan” font, and the concept of composition based on strong geometrical elements and expressive values of colors, testify to a move away from individually handcrafted and traditionally shaped goods towards objects meeting functional requirements suitable for mass production. In this regard, what became known as Bauhaus typography was also part of the social and political reform taking place at the school.”
Herbert Bayer, Universal font, 1925-26
A major feature of German art in the early 20th century until 1933 was a boom in the production of works of art of a grotesque style
In 1925, Gropius commissioned Bayer to design a typeface for all Bauhaus communications and Bayer excitedly undertook this task. He used his approach to modern typography to create an “idealist typeface.” The result was “universal” - a simple geometric sans-serif font. In Bayer’s design, not only were serifs unnecessary, he felt there was no need for an upper and lower case for each letter. Part of his rationale was to simplify typesetting and the typewriter keyboard layout. “Herbert Bayer was the only ‘master’ at the Bauhaus with a long-term commitment to typography, but—by comparison with Renner, Tschichold, or Trump, at Munich— his work showed little of the calligraphically trained and historically informed typographer’s sensitivity to letterforms or the handling of text.”3 These ideals were adopted by Jan Tschichold who never attended the Bauhaus, nor worked there, but visited and corresponded with teachers at the school. He was greatly influenced by the Bauhaus approach to typography.
In 1927, Weissenhof Estate is built in Stuttgart. Expressionist architects, Taut, Poelzig, Scharoun, build in international style.
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Typography by Herbert Bayer.
1. Typography is shaped by functional requirements. 2. The aim of typographic layout is communication (for which it is the graphic medium). Communication must appear in the shortest, simplest, most penetrating form. 3. For typography to serve social ends, its ingredients need internal organization - (ordered content) as well as external organization (the typographic material properly related).
Lรกszlรณ Moholy-Nagy, catalog with samples of student work from the Bauhaus in Dessau.
TYPOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLES 12
The Bauhaus set forth elementary principles of typographic communication:
Josef Albers
Albers (1886-1976) was both a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus. Principally an abstract painter, Albers also was a designer and typographer.
The Nazi regime banned modern art, which they condemned as degenerate art (from the German: entartete Kunst). According to Nazi ideology, modern art deviated from the prescribed norm of classical beauty.
His Kombinationschrift alphabet was a modular lettering system based upon 10 basic shapes derived from a circle and a square. it was designed to be efficient—both easy to learn and inexpensive to produce. The result was not a legible as Bayer’s but the idea of modularity was in line with the school philosophy of creating streamlined objects for mass production. The radical constructivist designs we now immediately connect with Bauhaus were only carried out in drafts, drawings and lettering, not as commercial typefaces.
ITC Bauhaus
In 1931, the De Stijl(The stye in Dutch) Movement founded in 1917 in Netherlands came to an end
The typeface ITC Bauhaus is a design from 1975 by Ed Benguiat and Victor Caruso inspired by the ideas of Bayer, Schmidt et al, but it is not a revival of any Bauhaus design.
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Ludwig Mies Van De Rohe (1886 - 1969), German architect and last director of the Bauhaus.
THE LAST YEARS 14
Gropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, succeeded by the architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954). Meyer maintained the emphasis on mass-producible design and eliminated parts of the curriculum he felt were overly formalist in nature. Additionally, he stressed the social function of architecture and design, favoring concern for the public good rather than private luxury. Advertising and photography continued to gain prominence under his leadership. Under pressure from an increasingly right-wing municipal government, Meyer resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1930. He was replaced by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Mies once again reconfigured the curriculum, with an increased emphasis on architecture. Mies also made it a private school and did not allow any of Meyer’s supporters to attend it. Lily Reich (1885–1947), who collaborated with Mies on a number of his private commissions, assumed control of the new interior design department. Other departments included weaving, photography, the fine arts, and building. The increasingly unstable political situation in Germany, combined with the perilous financial condition of the Bauhaus, caused Mies to relocate the school to Berlin in 1930, where it operated on a reduced scale. He ultimately shuttered the Bauhaus in 1933. This was due to the pressure from the Nazi led government which had claimed it was a center of communist intellectualism.
The bauhaus was forced to shut down as the Nazi regime claimed its system to be Anti-nazi and Jewish.
The Nazi symbol
Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.
During the turbulent and often dangerous years of World War II, many of the key figures of the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States, where their work and their teaching philosophies influenced generations of young architects and designers. Marcel Breuer and Joseph Albers taught at Yale, Walter Gropius went to Harvard, and Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.
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Illinois Institute of Technology
CONCLUSION
The Bauhaus style does not just influence architectural design, it encompasses everything from tables to chairs, even bikes! László Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago in 1937 and opened the New Bauhaus. The New Bauhaus closed after only a year but Moholy-Nagy converted it into the Institute of Design and ran it until 1946. This school offered the first complete modern design curriculum in America. The Illinois Institute of Technology is a descendant of the New Bauhaus. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in modern architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus has had a profound influence upon later developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. After the war, the Swiss continued to develop the ideas of the Bauhaus in typography and layout. New Typography or International Typographic Style or Swiss Design are terms that identify newer Bauhaus-inspired approaches to graphic design. Bauhaus has highly influenced design and typography till today with its geometric san serif fonts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY metmuseum.org wikipedia.com designhistory.org artnet.com Frank Whitford, ‘Bauhaus’, Thames and Hudson,1984