by Janet Grischy

Created on: November 13, 2008

Bauhaus was a design movement that began in Germany, at a school started by the architect Walter Gropius in 1919. Born in the ruins of World War I, it was consciously unornamented, practical, and functional. Its intent was to serve the needs of the mass of people, not the elite. Many of its themes and motifs came from manufacturing, rather than from mythology, existing structures, or previous architectural movements.

Walter Gropius ran the school from1919 to 1927. Under his direction, the school did not actually teach architecture, but rather design principles and craft. Gropius was replaced by Hannes Meyer, who was in charge until 1930. The Bauhaus began teaching architecture. Then Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over and ran the school until 1933. He ousted the followers of Meyer, and essentially instituted his own esthetic. The school also had three locations: Weimar until 1925,
Dessau until 1932, and Berlin until 1933, when the Nazis shut it down.

One motto of the Bauhaus was "starting from zero". In those days, many in Germany had nothing, but the motto referred to more than that. The students and teachers at the Bauhaus wanted to create design that referred to nothing from the past. It was the future they were in love with. Machines, speed, progress, and evolution were their themes.

These ideals were expressed in architecture through a conscious simplification. Bauhaus structures had flat roofs, or roofs that consisted of one long slanted plane, thus avoiding the peaked gables that were thought to be merely ornamental. They had windows that met at the corners, to let light in and to emphasize that the walls were not holding up he building, but were only a "curtain" that veiled the real structure that held up the roof. They put buildings up on piers (steel poles or columns), to set them off and to separate functions. Such ornament as was permitted served the purpose of emphasizing the structure or purpose of the building.

This expressed structure was very important to the Bauhaus style, as were honest materials. Members of the Bauhaus movement disliked buildings that looked as if they were made of a certain material when they really were not. So they disapproved of framing buildings in wood or steel and then covering them in decorative slabs of granite, sandstone or marble. They also disapproved of buildings that disguised their function; so for example, they did not want to see banks that imitated Greek or Roman temples.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first

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