The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in April 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, weeks after the end of the First World War and six months after the fall of the German monarchy. Gropius combined two existing institutions — the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art — into a single teaching workshop whose central claim was that fine art, craft and industrial design belonged in the same curriculum.

The school ran for fourteen years across three cities. Weimar (1919–1925) under pressure from conservative local authorities. Dessau (1925–1932) in the purpose-built Gropius campus that became the school’s visual icon. Berlin (1932–1933) in a rented telephone factory until the Nazi Party forced closure on 11 April 1933.

Three directors shaped its curriculum: Gropius (1919–1928, the unifier), Hannes Meyer (1928–1930, a Swiss Marxist who pushed the school towards social-housing architecture), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–1933, who reorganised it around architecture until political conditions made continuation impossible).

Graphic design at the Bauhaus was never a named department — the school only formalised typography as a discipline in 1925 — but every workshop produced print, posters, books and identity systems. The output was the discipline.

The Bauhaus operated on four load-bearing principles that still propagate through modern graphic design pedagogy.

Form follows function. Coined by Louis Sullivan and appropriated at the Bauhaus, the idea that a design’s form should be derived from what it has to do — not from historical ornament — became the movement’s spine.

“Art and technology — a new unity.” — Walter Gropius, programme for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition

The Vorkurs (Preliminary Course). Every student, regardless of specialism, spent their first year on material studies, tactile exercises and colour theory. The course, run first by Johannes Itten and then by Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, is the direct ancestor of every modern art-school foundation year.

Art + craft + industry. The school’s founding premise was that artists needed workshop training and craftsmen needed aesthetic training. Both needed to understand industrial production.

Lowercase, asymmetric, sans-serif. Under Bayer’s direction from 1925, all school printing moved to lowercase Universal-alphabet geometric sans serif, asymmetric layouts and grid-based composition. Bayer’s argument: “we do not speak a capital A and a small a” — a manifesto for phonetic, rationalised typography that routed directly into Swiss postwar design.