Alejandro Hincapie | Post 4
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| Printed on Bauhau's manifesto, woodcut demonstrated school's regard for medieval expressionism. |
By the 1920’s, it had become clear that the advent of the machine—the arrival of the Industrial Revolution—could not be seriously rejected. Grounded in the philosophical base of the English Arts & Crafts Movement born decades earlier and existing in embracement of industry, the Bauhaus was a German design school where avant-garde ideas about art and design were explored, fused, and applied to solving problems of design and industrial production. The ideas and design philosophies explored and realized at the Bauhaus would come to be monumental in design history, establishing the visual language—a universal language—of 20th century Modernism in visual communication, typography, industrial design, and architecture.
A union between the former applied-arts-oriented Weimar Arts and Crafts School and the fine arts focused Weimar Art Academy, the Bauhaus was founded in April 1919 in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius.ost-WWI Germany was a place of severe socio-economic unrest when a need for new social orders was almost palpable. Gropius’ vision for the school was formed in recognition of the common roots of both the fine and applied arts. He imagined a new unity of art and technology and called on a generation of innovative artists and designers to the school to solve problems of visual design created by the onset of industrialism. Gropius reasoned that an artistically trained designer and craftsman could “breath a soul into the dead product of the machine,” and for him, only the best ideas were good enough to justify their realization through mass production made possible by industry (Meggs 327). While Gropius’ regard for artistic expression and the importance of quality craftsmanship stemmed from the philosophy of William Morris and the English Art’s and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century, his vision of industry coexisting harmoniously with art, design, and craft signified an altogether new way of thinking.
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| Bayer. Poster for Bauhaus Exhibition. 1926. Exempliefies the Bauhau's establishment of visual hierarchy in graphical communication. |
The Bauhaus’ early years in Weimar from 1919 to 1924 were largely characterized by this visionary spirit. Looking towards the Gothic cathedral as the ultimate expressive integration of architecture, sculpture, painting, crafts, and the applied arts, the Bauhaus organized its classes along medieval Bauhütte lines of master, journeyman, and apprentice. The core of the Bauhaus’ curriculum was its preliminary course where students developed an understanding of the physical nature of materials and were taught the fundamental principles of design underlying all visual arts in the hopes of releasing each student’s creative abilities. The course’s designer, Johannes Itten sought to develop perceptual awareness, intellectual abilities, and awareness of emotional experience and intuition in his students. Itten’s leaving the Bauhaus in 1923 over disagreements about the conduct of his course signified a shift of concern within the school from the expressionism towards more emphasis on rationalism, objectivity, and designing for industrial production.
Itten’s replacement was Hungarian-constructivist Lazlo Maholy-Nagy. The designer would come to contribute important ideas about typography, describing it as “a tool of communication” whose emphasis must be on clarity and legibility and must never be impaired by being forced into conforming to pre-existing aesthetics. He also emphasized the importance of embracing typography in all its variables, articulating communication through the use of different typefaces and type sizes that ultimately come together to create underlying geometric forms and structures that lead the reader through a functional sequence of information. This establishment of the important of creating a clear visual hierarchy in pieces of visual communication is exemplary of the Bauhaus new focus on creating design founded on objectivity and ultimately, functionality.
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| The innovative design of the Bauhaus school at Dessau. |
This shift in emphasis at the school also coincided with a physical move. In late 1924, tensions between the Bauhaus and the local, conservative Weimar government forced the relocation of the school to the small, industrial city of Dessau. It was at Dessau that the influence of art and design movements like Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Dutch De Stijl, particularly their ideas about reduction, simplification, and abstraction of form, kinetic energy, and spatial organization were absorbed into the Bauhaus philosophy of creating objectively designed and functional pieces of visual communication, industrial design, and architecture. Rather than continuing the language of these movements, the Bauhaus refined their vocabulary into practical, functional applications manifested in design innovations like easily produced tubular steel in product design and architecture, and widespread use of clear, legible sans-serif typography in graphic design—all in works that stressed form over function; meaning, a piece's functional use must ultimately dictate the form of the piece. Design elements were complimented by a strong use of the simplest of geometric forms, asymmetrical balance and visual armatures in compositions, as well as a preference of objectively captured photography over illustrative renderings. The presence of artists and designers like Wassily Kandinsky, Theo Van Doesburg, Paul Kee, and Herbert Bayer as instructors at the Bauhaus or as inspired, influential voices in the school’s community would prove vital to the development of the Bauhaus’s design’s philosophy.
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| Mies Van der Rohe. Seagram Building. 1959. |
The Bauhaus was closed in 1933 after increasing Nazi interference at the school. The Bauhaus’s place as a seminal moment in the development of art and design where the convergence of many early 20th century movements were applied into the design of products, architecture, and visual communication on the eve of the paralyzing and catastrophic advent of WWII would ensure the school’s influence on the development of Modernism for the duration of the century. Many of the Bauhuas’ faculty and instructors were able to flee Nazi Germany and emigrate to the US, bringing with them the school's design philosophies and ensuring their survival and application in the booming, postwar American industrial economy. Today, the influence of the Bauhaus remains largely unquestionable and clearly visible. The school’s curriculum has formed the basis for many of interdisciplinary, and even single disciplinary art schools. The philosophy of "form follows function" has become the archetype motto from which so much of Modernist design has been founded on. Icons of Modernist architecture like the Seagram building designed by Mies van der Rohe exemplify the school’s philosophy functionalism through objective applications of modern materials like glass and steel in the creation of a design that is harmoniously balanced and aesthetically pleasing, as well as functionally effective.
Reference
*Image descriptions link to image source.
Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design. 5th ed. Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley & Sons, 2012. Print.
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