What is the Bauhaus?
The Staatliches Bauhaus — literally, the State House of Building — was founded in Weimar in April 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, who merged the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts with the Weimar Academy of Fine Art into a single new institution with a radical programme.
Gropius's founding manifesto declared that the goal of all creative activity was building — that architecture was not one art among many but the mother art, the discipline that gave all other creative work its purpose and context. Painting, sculpture, typography, furniture, theatre, and weaving were not separate fields but components of a single whole, and the Bauhaus's task was to train people who could work fluently across all of them. The school gathered an extraordinary faculty to realise this ambition: Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky taught painting and colour theory; László Moholy-Nagy taught light, photography, and typography; Oskar Schlemmer taught theatre and the figure; Herbert Bayer designed the school's graphics and typefaces; Marcel Breuer ran the joinery workshop and produced the tubular steel furniture that became some of the twentieth century's most recognised design objects.
Each workshop was led jointly by a master of form — a fine artist — and a master of craft — a skilled artisan — a structure deliberately intended to bridge the divide between fine and applied art that Gropius believed was one of the defining problems of modern cultural life. Students worked with their hands as well as their minds. The making of objects was not secondary to the thinking about them; it was the same activity.
What is Bauhaus architecture?
Bauhaus architecture is not a single style so much as a set of principles applied to building. Those principles — developed through the school's teaching, its faculty's practice, and the buildings its directors designed — can be summarised as follows:
Honesty of structure. A building should express how it is made and what holds it up. The structural frame should be legible from the exterior; the relationship between support and enclosure should be clear. Applied cladding that conceals structure is dishonest; exposed frame that declares it is not.
Rejection of applied ornament. Decoration added to a building's surface after the structural and spatial decisions have been made is unnecessary and wasteful. A building achieves its character through proportion, material, and the organisation of space — not through the application of historical motifs or decorative programmes to its surfaces.
Form follows function. A building's external appearance should be generated by the requirements of its interior programme. The number and size of windows should reflect the light requirements of the rooms behind them; the arrangement of volumes should reflect the organisation of spaces within them. The façade is not a mask but an expression.
Integration of art and production. Architecture is not separate from industrial production; it draws on the same materials, the same techniques, and the same formal intelligence. Designing a building and designing a chair are not different in kind — they are different in scale.
Social responsibility. Good design is not a luxury reserved for those who can afford it. The Bauhaus believed that well-designed buildings and objects should be available to everyone, and that the mass production techniques of industrial society were the means by which that could be achieved.
These principles were not invented by the Bauhaus. They were in the air throughout European architecture in the first two decades of the twentieth century, expressed by Peter Behrens at AEG, argued by Adolf Loos in 'Ornament and Crime', explored by the Deutscher Werkbund as a matter of national cultural policy. What the Bauhaus did was gather those ideas into a single institution, give them a pedagogy and a building, and disseminate them through two generations of trained designers.
The origins: before the Bauhaus
The Bauhaus did not emerge from nowhere. To understand what it was and why it mattered, it is necessary to understand what came before it — the network of ideas, people, and buildings that made it possible.
Peter Behrens and the AEG
Peter Behrens (1868–1940) is the figure who most directly prepared the ground for the Bauhaus, though he is far less well known than the school he influenced. In 1901 he designed his own house on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt — the Behrens House — as the first realisation of the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal: a complete environment in which architecture, furniture, ceramics, and textiles were unified under a single creative intelligence. It was his first building and the first expression of an idea that Gropius would institutionalise eighteen years later.
In 1907 Behrens was appointed artistic director of AEG, Germany's largest electrical company, with a brief that extended across every aspect of the corporation's visual presence — buildings, products, graphics, and corporate identity. The AEG Turbine Factory (1909), the centrepiece of this programme, is the founding monument of modern industrial architecture: a steel-and-glass hall that treated manufacturing as a subject worthy of monumental architectural expression, and that demonstrated for the first time that structural honesty and industrial materials could achieve formal dignity without historical ornament.
In the years while the Turbine Factory was being designed and built, Behrens's office employed Walter Gropius (1907–10), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1908–11), and Le Corbusier (briefly, 1910). The three architects who would define twentieth-century modernism were trained in the same atelier, on the same building, at the same moment. The coincidence is one of the most remarkable facts in architectural history.
Adolf Loos and the Vienna parallel
While Behrens was developing his industrial programme in Berlin, Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was making parallel arguments in Vienna from a different starting point. Loos had spent three years in the United States in the 1890s, where he encountered the practical directness of American commercial building and came to believe that the European tradition of applied architectural ornament was not merely unnecessary but actively harmful. His essay 'Ornament and Crime' (1908) made this case with polemical force that reverberated across Europe.
His buildings in Vienna — particularly the Looshaus (Goldman & Salatsch building, 1911) on the Michaelerplatz, whose ornament-free façade caused a scandal in imperial Vienna — and his Viennese villas of the 1920s, culminating in the Moller House (1928) and the Villa Müller (1930), demonstrated that a building stripped of applied decoration could achieve extraordinary presence and spatial richness. Loos organised his villa interiors on the Raumplan principle — rooms at varying heights, each occupying the level its function demanded — in a way that was philosophically adjacent to the Bauhaus programme without being institutionally connected to it.
The Fagus Factory: Gropius's first building
Walter Gropius left Behrens's office in 1910 and immediately tested what he had learned at the most radical possible scale. The Fagus Factory at Alfeld an der Leine (1911–13, with Adolf Meyer) took the structural logic of the AEG Turbine Factory and dissolved it: where Behrens had retained classical corner piers to give his building monumental gravity, Gropius stripped them away entirely. The glass curtain wall wraps around the corner of the building without any masonry support — the internal frame carries all the loads, the external skin is pure transparent enclosure. It was the first time this had been done in architectural history, and it introduced the glass curtain wall to architecture.
The Fagus Factory has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011. Gropius founded the Bauhaus eight years after designing it, and the Bauhaus Dessau sixteen years after. The line from the Turbine Factory to the Fagus Factory to the Bauhaus Dessau is the central thread of Bauhaus architecture's development.
The Bauhaus in Weimar: 1919–1925
The Bauhaus's first home was Weimar, in the former Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts building. The Weimar years were creatively intense but institutionally precarious. The school attracted exceptional students — among them Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Gunta Stölzl, and Anni Albers — and an extraordinary faculty, but it operated in a state of perpetual tension with the conservative Thuringian government that funded it.
The curriculum developed rapidly in these years. Gropius brought Johannes Itten to lead the preliminary course — the Vorkurs — a foundational programme in which students spent their first semester working with materials, textures, and abstract formal relationships before being assigned to workshops. When Itten left in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy took over the preliminary course and redirected it towards industrial materials and processes, giving the school's output a cleaner, more machine-oriented character.
The Weimar exhibition of 1923 — held under the title Art and Technology: A New Unity — was the Bauhaus's first major public statement of its programme. It demonstrated the school's workshops through a model house, the Haus am Horn, designed by Georg Muche, which applied Bauhaus principles to a complete domestic environment. The exhibition attracted international attention and established the school's reputation beyond Germany.
But the political situation in Thuringia was deteriorating. A conservative government took power in 1924 and cut the school's funding; Gropius negotiated a move to Dessau, whose Social Democratic city government was actively supportive.
The Bauhaus in Dessau: 1925–1932
The Dessau years were the Bauhaus at its most productive and most influential. The new building that Gropius designed for the school — the Bauhaus Dessau (1926) — was the movement's greatest single architectural achievement: a complex of interlocking wings housing workshops, studios, theatre, canteen, administrative offices, and student accommodation, organised in a pinwheel plan that had to be experienced in movement.
The building expressed the school's programme directly in built form. The workshop wing presents a three-storey glass curtain wall to the street — a continuous transparent skin wrapping the corners without masonry interruption, a development of the idea first realised at the Fagus Factory. The southern stair block façade of the workshop wing is defined by the BAUHAUS lettering extruded vertically down its side — the school naming itself in the same formal language as its architecture. The entrance elevation brings the building's geometry to its pivot point, the glazed stair tower rising beside the administrative bridge.
The Masters' Houses on Ebertallee — semi-detached cubic villas with flat roofs, terraces, and corner windows, designed by Gropius for the school's faculty — extended the Bauhaus architectural programme to domestic scale, each house a refined application of the same principles that governed the school building.
In the workshops, the Dessau years produced the designs that gave the Bauhaus its enduring impact on everyday design: Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs, Wilhelm Wagenfeld's glass lamp, Herbert Bayer's universal typeface, Marianne Brandt's metal vessels, Anni Albers's woven textiles. These were not fine art objects; they were designs intended for industrial production, and several of them entered commercial manufacture during the school's lifetime.
The Bauhaus books series — fourteen volumes published between 1925 and 1930, edited by Gropius and Moholy-Nagy — disseminated the school's ideas internationally. Translated into multiple languages, they reached architects, designers, and educators across Europe and America and established the Bauhaus programme as the dominant intellectual reference point for progressive design in the interwar period.
Gropius resigned the directorship in 1928 and was succeeded by Hannes Meyer, who shifted the school's emphasis towards social function and collective design. Meyer was in turn succeeded by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930, who attempted to depoliticise the school in the face of growing Nazi pressure by relocating it to Berlin as a private institution. The effort failed. The Gestapo closed the Bauhaus permanently in July 1933.
The Bauhaus dispersal and global influence
The closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 was, paradoxically, one of the most effective mechanisms for the dissemination of its ideas. The faculty scattered across Europe and America, carrying the Bauhaus programme with them into new universities, schools, and practices:
Walter Gropius moved to Britain in 1934, then to the United States in 1937, joining the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he transformed architectural education in America, training a generation that included Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Paul Rudolph.
László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 — later the Institute of Design — bringing the Bauhaus preliminary course programme to American design education.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe moved to Chicago in 1938, joining the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he designed the campus and taught until 1958. His mature American work — the Farnsworth House (1951), the Seagram Building (1958) — became the defining expression of the glass and steel modernism that dominated commercial architecture worldwide in the postwar decades.
Marcel Breuer moved to Harvard with Gropius and later established his own influential practice in New York.
Herbert Bayer moved to New York and subsequently to Aspen, where his influence on American graphic design and corporate communications was profound.
Josef and Anni Albers moved to the United States in 1933, Josef joining the faculty of Black Mountain College in North Carolina — an experimental arts school that became an important node in the transmission of Bauhaus ideas in America.
The result was that by the 1950s, Bauhaus principles had permeated architectural and design education across the Western world. The glass curtain wall skyscraper that defined the postwar commercial city — from Manhattan to Tokyo to Sydney — is the direct descendant of ideas that Gropius first worked out at the Fagus Factory corner in 1911. The modernist domestic interior — white walls, open plan, functional furniture, honest materials — carries the same lineage.
Bauhaus architecture: key buildings
Behrens House, Darmstadt, Germany (1901) — Peter Behrens
The Gesamtkunstwerk origin: his own home and first building, where the integration of architecture and design was first fully realised. Part of the UNESCO World Heritage Mathildenhöhe (2021).
Architecture guide · Model
AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin, Germany (1909) — Peter Behrens
The founding monument of modern industrial architecture; the building that trained Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier.
Architecture guide · Model
Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany (1913) — Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer
The first glass curtain wall; Gropius's debut building; UNESCO World Heritage Site 2011.
Architecture guide · Model
Haus am Horn, Weimar, Germany (1923) — Georg Muche
The Bauhaus exhibition house; a model domestic environment applying the school's workshop outputs to a complete interior.
Bauhaus Dessau, Dessau, Germany (1926) — Walter Gropius
The most important school building of the twentieth century; UNESCO World Heritage Site 1996.
Architecture guide · Model — southern façade · Model — entrance
Masters' Houses, Dessau, Germany (1926) — Walter Gropius
Faculty housing applying Bauhaus principles to domestic scale; part of the UNESCO designation.
Moller House, Vienna, Austria (1928) — Adolf Loos
Loos's parallel modernism; the Raumplan principle at its most resolved; the Bauhaus argument stated from outside the institution.
Architecture guide · Model
Villa Müller, Prague, Czech Republic (1930) — Adolf Loos
Loos's other great Raumplan villa; the fullest spatial realisation of his domestic principles.
Bauhaus Building, Berlin, Germany (1932) — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
The school's final home before closure; a converted factory, stripped and adapted with characteristic Miesian precision.
The Bauhaus style: what does it look like?
Bauhaus style in architecture is characterised by a consistent set of visual and spatial qualities that flow directly from the movement's principles:
White rendered or light-coloured walls, unornamented and flush — the building's surface as a neutral ground for the geometry of openings and the play of light and shadow rather than as a field for decoration.
Flat roofs — the rejection of the pitched roof as a historical convention with no functional justification in a climate where flat roofs can be properly waterproofed; the roof as a usable outdoor space, a terrace, an extension of the living area.
Large windows and glazed surfaces — the pursuit of natural light as a functional requirement and a quality of life; the glass curtain wall as the logical conclusion of the structural frame's liberation of the exterior skin from load-bearing duty.
Asymmetrical compositions — the building's form generated by its interior programme rather than imposed from outside; windows placed where the rooms behind them require light rather than where symmetry demands them.
Expressed structure — columns, beams, and frames legible from the exterior; the building's structural logic made visible rather than concealed behind cladding.
Open plan interiors — the structural frame freeing the interior from the grid of load-bearing walls that had previously determined room layout; spaces flowing into each other, boundaries defined by furniture and light rather than fixed partitions.
These qualities, taken together, constitute what is recognisable as Bauhaus architecture style — a visual language that had become, by the 1950s, the default language of institutional and commercial building worldwide, and that remains the dominant visual reference for progressive residential and cultural architecture today.
The Bauhaus and design
Architecture was the Bauhaus's founding ambition, but its influence on Bauhaus design more broadly has been equally transformative. The school's workshops produced designs across every applied art discipline that were characterised by the same principles as the architecture: functional clarity, honest materials, the rejection of applied ornament, and a commitment to industrial reproducibility.
Furniture — Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chairs, including the Wassily Chair (1925) and the Cesca Chair (1928), applied industrial materials to domestic furniture design and established the aesthetic of the modernist interior.
Lighting — Wilhelm Wagenfeld's glass table lamp (1924) and the range of metal desk lamps produced in the metal workshop established a clean, functional aesthetic for domestic lighting that remains influential.
Typography and graphic design — Herbert Bayer's universal typeface (1925) and the school's graphic programme, characterised by geometric sans-serif letterforms and asymmetric layout, directly shaped the development of modernist graphic design.
Textiles — the weaving workshop, led by Gunta Stölzl and including Anni Albers, produced woven textiles of extraordinary formal intelligence that fed into both industrial production and fine art.
Photography — Moholy-Nagy's teaching and practice established photography as a creative discipline within the Bauhaus programme and influenced the development of documentary and experimental photography in Europe and America.
Cultural significance: why the Bauhaus still matters
The Bauhaus matters for reasons that go beyond its historical importance. The questions it asked — about the relationship between art and production, between design and society, between form and function — are not settled questions. They are live questions that every architect, designer, and design educator still has to answer.
The Bauhaus approach to design education — the preliminary course, the workshop system, the integration of making and thinking, the conviction that students should work with materials rather than just think about them — has been challenged, revised, and adapted since 1933, but never superseded. Most serious art and design education in the Western world still operates in a space that the Bauhaus defined.
The social programme of the Bauhaus — the conviction that good design was a social responsibility, that well-designed buildings and objects should be available to everyone — is contested again today in ways that it was not in the decades of postwar consensus. The failure of mass modernist housing, the global crisis of housing affordability, the environmental cost of the built environment — all of these force a rethinking of the relationship between design ambition and social reality that the Bauhaus first made central to architectural education.
And the buildings themselves — the Fagus Factory, the Bauhaus Dessau, the Masters' Houses — remain among the most studied, most visited, and most admired works of the twentieth century. They have the quality that the best architecture always has: they reward sustained attention. The more you look, the more you see.
Frequently asked questions about Bauhaus architecture
What is the Bauhaus?
The Bauhaus was a school of art, craft, and design founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius. It operated for fourteen years across three cities — Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin — before being closed by the Nazi government in 1933. Its programme combined fine art, craft workshop training, and architectural education, based on the conviction that all creative disciplines were components of a single architectural whole. Despite its brief existence, it became the most influential design school in history, reshaping architecture, graphic design, typography, furniture, and textile design worldwide.
What is Bauhaus architecture?
Bauhaus architecture is the architectural expression of the Bauhaus movement's principles: honest expression of structure, rejection of applied ornament, form generated by function, large glazed surfaces, flat roofs, and open plan interiors. It emerged from a lineage that begins with Peter Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory (1909), runs through Walter Gropius's Fagus Factory (1913) and Bauhaus Dessau (1926), and extends through the postwar International Style into the glass and steel commercial architecture that still dominates city centres worldwide.
What is the Bauhaus movement?
The Bauhaus movement refers to the broader cultural and design influence that spread from the Bauhaus school after its founding in 1919 and especially after its closure in 1933, when its faculty dispersed across Europe and America. The movement encompasses architecture, graphic design, typography, furniture, textiles, photography, and theatre, unified by a shared set of principles about the relationship between art, craft, and industrial production. It became, in the decades following the Second World War, the dominant intellectual framework for progressive design education and practice worldwide.
Who founded the Bauhaus?
The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969) in Weimar in April 1919. Gropius served as director until 1928, when he was succeeded by Hannes Meyer (1928–30) and then Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–33).
Where was the Bauhaus?
The Bauhaus operated in three locations. It was founded in Weimar in 1919, where it remained until 1925. It moved to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed the purpose-built Bauhaus Dessau building (1926) that remains the movement's most important architectural monument. Under Mies van der Rohe it briefly relocated to Berlin in 1932 as a private school before the Gestapo closed it permanently in July 1933.
What are the key principles of Bauhaus design?
The key principles of Bauhaus design are: the rejection of applied ornament; honest expression of structure and materials; form generated by function; the integration of art, craft, and industrial production; and the conviction that good design is a social responsibility that should be available to all, not a luxury reserved for the wealthy. These principles were applied across every discipline the school taught, from architecture to typography to furniture to textile design.
What is Bauhaus style in architecture?
Bauhaus style in architecture is characterised by white rendered or light-coloured unornamented walls, flat roofs, large windows and glazed curtain walls, asymmetric compositions generated by interior function, expressed structural frames, and open plan interiors. It rejects historical ornament and applied decoration in favour of the inherent qualities of structure, proportion, and material. It became the visual language of modernist architecture worldwide in the postwar decades.
What buildings are associated with Bauhaus architecture?
The most important Bauhaus architecture buildings include the Fagus Factory at Alfeld an der Leine (Gropius and Meyer, 1913; UNESCO World Heritage Site), the Bauhaus Dessau (Gropius, 1926; UNESCO World Heritage Site), and the Masters' Houses in Dessau (Gropius, 1926). The AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (Behrens, 1909) is the foundational work that directly shaped Gropius's Bauhaus architecture, and the Moller House in Vienna (Loos, 1928) represents the parallel Viennese strand of the same intellectual movement.
What is the difference between Bauhaus and modernism?
Bauhaus is a specific school, movement, and historical phenomenon with identifiable buildings, people, and dates. Modernism in architecture is a broader term covering the rejection of historical styles and the pursuit of new forms appropriate to contemporary life and technology, which encompasses the Bauhaus but also other movements — the Dutch De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, French Purism, and the Swedish functionalism known as Funkis. The Bauhaus was the most influential single institution within architectural modernism, and Bauhaus principles became so widely diffused that they are often indistinguishable from modernism in general — but modernism was larger and more varied than the Bauhaus alone.
How did the Bauhaus influence architecture today?
The Bauhaus's influence on architecture today operates primarily through the International Style — the glass and steel modernism that dominated commercial and institutional architecture from the 1950s onwards — and through design education. Most architecture schools in the Western world still teach versions of the Bauhaus preliminary course; the workshop system of learning by making; and the conviction that architecture is a social discipline with responsibilities beyond aesthetics. The glass curtain wall, the flat roof, the open plan, and the honest expression of structure — features of the buildings that surround us daily — all carry the Bauhaus lineage.
Related pages and models
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia — 'Bauhaus' — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus — Comprehensive overview of the school, its history, faculty, and legacy
- Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin — bauhaus.de — The primary archive and museum for Bauhaus history; extensive online resources and permanent collection
- Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau — bauhaus-dessau.de — The foundation managing the Dessau building, its collection, and exhibition programme
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — 'Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau' — https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/729
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — 'Fagus-Werk in Alfeld' — https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1368
- Frank Whitford — Bauhaus (Thames & Hudson, 1984) — The standard English-language survey of the school, its faculty, and its buildings; the best single introduction
- Magdalena Droste — Bauhaus (Taschen, 1990; revised 2006) — Comprehensive illustrated history of the school with extensive coverage of the Dessau years and workshop outputs
- Winfried Nerdinger — Walter Gropius (Busch-Reisinger Museum / Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1985) — Monograph on Gropius's complete architectural work
- Stanford Anderson — Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2000) — Definitive study of Behrens; essential for understanding the pre-Bauhaus lineage
- Tilmann Buddensieg — Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–1914 (MIT Press, 1984) — For the AEG programme and its influence on the Bauhaus generation
