Qualla: Bauhaus

Bauhaus: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The founding manifesto declared that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was the building. The school did not teach architecture for another eight years. That gap says a great deal about the Bauhaus, which existed from 1919 to 1933, occupied three cities, and ran through three directors who disagreed with one another profoundly. Walter Gropius founded it in Weimar on 1 April 1919 by merging the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art with the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts. Fourteen years later the faculty voted to shut it down themselves rather than operate under the Gestapo. Between those two dates, a few hundred people worked out how mass production and artistic intention might be reconciled - and then, scattered across the world by the regime that closed them, taught the answer to everyone else.

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Image: OTFW, Berlin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bauhaus: A Guild Without the Barrier

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LarderArch, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gropius took the job in a Germany that had just lost a war and acquired a republic, in a burst of liberalisation that made room for experiment the old order had suppressed. His name for the school pointed backwards as much as forwards: Bauhaus evokes both building and the Bauhütt...

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Image: LarderArch | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bauhaus: The Women They Sent to the Looms

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geheimnisträgerin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Bauhaus declared equality between the sexes and accepted women from the start, and in its first year more women applied than men. Gropius's response was not what the manifesto implied. He announced that for the foreseeable future only women of extraordinary talent would be ad...

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Image: Geheimnisträgerin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bauhaus: Dessau, and the Argument Over What a School Is For

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Thuringia's conservative politicians moved against the school as tensions rose after 1923, halving its funding and putting staff on six-month contracts; on 26 December 1924 the Bauhaus announced its own closure for the following March. It reopened in Dessau in 1925, with Gropius'...

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Image: Public domain

Bauhaus: Ten Months in a Berlin Factory

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BergA, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the Nazi Party took control of the Dessau city council in 1931, it moved to close the school. In late 1932 Mies rented a derelict factory on Birkbusch Street in Berlin with his own money; students and faculty rehabilitated the building themselves and painted the interior whi...

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Image: BergA | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bauhaus: The Style That Outlived the School

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sciencefish, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Moholy-Nagy regrouped in London, in the Isokon flats on Lawn Road. Gropius and Breuer went on to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where their students included Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei and Paul Rudolph. Mies settled in Chicago to run the architec...

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Image: Sciencefish | CC BY-SA 4.0