- After the tragedies of World War I,
and the decimation of the German economy,
the Bauhaus arrived and provided a glimpse
into the future of design.
Walter Gropius considered the 19th century concept
of the artist as a fun-loving bohemian,
to be naive and overly romanticized.
His goal was to create a culture that could
financially support painters, designers, and architects.
For Gropius, craft and skill were to be
the basis of all artistic endeavors.
At the Bauhaus, he created not classes, but workshops.
He called his professors masters,
and his students apprentices.
Gropius focused not on the suffering artist,
or the designer who could only do one thing extremely well.
He believed that intellect, talent, and energy
should combine to work in all visual design fields.
This extended to the student work.
Whether a student created a lamp, brochure, or typeface,
the solution would link to the Bauhaus ideals of
craft, skill, and innovation.
Gropius and some of the other early founders
condemned purifying art as irrelevant,
and serving no purpose for society.
He insisted the products be accessible to everyone,
and refused to produce luxury items for connoisseurs.
He championed the machine and proclaimed the motto,
"Art and technology: a new unit".
The Bauhaus demanded speed, wanting to overcome
earthly sluggishness.
Reacting to the handmade and medieval approach
of the arts and crafts movement,
he complained that certain masters and students
refused to enter the modern age,
working with slow and laborious methods.
This reverence for the machine triggered a heated debate
on the direction of the Bauhaus.
The master, Georg Muche, a noted painter,
architect, and teacher, refused to enter into
a compromising relationship with the world of form,
devoid of meaning.
Kandinsky, the Russian genius who had introduced
abstract art to the Bauhaus,
worried that Gropius' approach elevated the machine
to idolatry.
After two years of debate and defections,
Gropius' approach was adopted,
and everything was reinvented from the ground up.
New was the charge for all aspects of the school.
New building, new vision, and new man.
The concept of style was also controversial
within the institution.
It was frowned upon as bourgeois and irrelevant.
But there was, of course, a clear Bauhaus style.
The minimalist vocabulary of form,
later termed less is more by Mies van Rohe,
the famous modernist German architect,
was about simplicity and democratic understatement.
Since then, the icons of modernism have included
clean lines and flat roofs in architecture,
exposed metal and furniture, and an overall
simplicity when it comes to graphic design.