Henry van de Velde

In 1902 the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach appointed van de Velde artistic adviser to the court. He settled in Weimar, reorganised the existing Kunstgewerbeschule and the academy of fine art, and in 1907 formally established the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts — the Grossherzoglich Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule — serving as its first director. The building he designed for the school, now called the Van-de-Velde-Bau, stands today as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is still the main building of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

That same year, 1907, he was a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund, the alliance of artists and industrialists that became the institutional engine of early German modernism. His position within the Werkbund was characteristically individualist: at the 1914 Cologne exhibition he opposed Hermann Muthesius’s call for Typisierung (standardisation), arguing that the artist-designer’s individual creative vision was not negotiable. The debate was not resolved — it ran through the Bauhaus’s own institutional conflicts a decade later.

For the same Cologne exhibition he designed the Werkbund Theatre: a reinforced-concrete building with a flexible interior, one of the first public cultural buildings to use pure modern structural form. The exhibition closed after three months when war broke out; the theatre was demolished shortly after.

When Belgium entered the war in 1914, van de Velde — as a foreign national — was required to leave Germany. Before departing he recommended three architects as possible successors: Walter Gropius, Hermann Obrist, and August Endell. The Grand Duke appointed Gropius. In 1919 Gropius merged the Kunstgewerbeschule with the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts to form the Staatliches Bauhaus. The institutional line from van de Velde’s school to the Bauhaus is direct.

After the war van de Velde settled in Switzerland, worked briefly for the Kröller-Müller collection in The Hague, and in 1925 returned to Belgium to take a professorship in Ghent. In 1926 he founded La Cambre (Institut National Supérieur des Arts Visuels) in Brussels, a design school still running today.

His major late work is the Boekentoren (Book Tower) at Ghent University (1933–42), a modernist library tower housing 3 million volumes. The building shows how far his formal vocabulary had moved: from Art Nouveau’s organic ornament toward the clean geometric language of European modernism, without the sharp break that defined the Bauhaus generation he had helped make possible.

Van de Velde died in Oberägeri, Switzerland, on 15 October 1957, aged 94. He outlived most of the Bauhaus masters, and the first full generation of designers his school had trained.

His legacy runs through institutions as much as through individual works. The Weimar school became the Bauhaus. The Werkbund model shaped interwar European design culture. La Cambre still trains designers in Brussels. His theoretical writing — from “Déblaiement d’art” (1894) to his posthumously published autobiography “Geschichte meines Lebens” (1962) — argues throughout that industry and the individual designer’s vision are not opposites, and that holding both in tension is the designer’s job.