In 1919 Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was appointed to head a new institution - the Bauhaus in Weimar (Germany). Bauhaus was founded combining the Weimar Art Academy, and the Weimar Arts and Crafts School.

New school of design

Bauhaus gathered people who believed that a rebirth of society and humanity is possible through the union of artistic media and potentials.
Both an artist and a master craftsman trained students, to make future artists familiar with science and economics, to unite creative imagination with a practical knowledge of craftsmanship, and to develop a new sense of functional design. Bauhaus taught the coexistence of modernity, machine, work, building, simplicity, complexity, and economy to form a new "functional" aesthetics of clear facades, and lines, dicarding any ornament.
Bauhaus "building" covered all levels - from building houses, to creating the new look of the cities, and 'building future', changing the environment, and designing the future.
The school had three aims at its inception:
1) to rescue arts from the isolation, create a synthesis of arts, and encourage the individual artisans and craftsmen to work cooperatively (team-work) combining their skills;
2) to elevate the status of crafts (designing and producing chairs, lamps, teapots, etc.), to the level enjoyed by fine arts;
3) to maintain contact with the leaders of industry and eventually gain independence from government support (funds), by selling designs to industry, or even having its own (limited) production.
These aims were basically the same throughout the life of the Bauhaus (1919-1932), even though the direction (conditions, and places) of the school changed significantly during these 13 years.
Bauhaus fitted with the social and culture plans of the Weimar Republic: to build homes which bring art to the people through their design. The Bauhaus program developed into real housing, and by 1924 mass housing was the great social issue of Weimar Germany; by 1932 no other country had built more houses for its workers. Most of the buildings for workers were built with tax money.
Instead of elaborate, classic buildings, the new architects opted for more simple, functional designs. Buildings were soon constructed in the form of concrete, steel, wood, stucco, and glass. A building must have a flat roof and a sheer façade, with neither cornices nor eaves. The result was rational social housing, with open floor plans, white walls, no drapes, and functional furniture.

Overall design

Bauhaus proved to be a focus of immense creative potential, that created the new, urban aesthetics, dominant worldwide for the next sixty years. It shaped everything - from teapots and chairs, to cars, sky-scrapers, and highway junctions.
"Everyone sitting on a chair with a tubular steel frame, using an adjustable reading lamp, or living in a house partly or entirely constructed from prefabricated elements is benefiting from a revolution in design largely brought about by the Bauhaus" (Whitford, F.: Bauhaus, London, Thames & Hudson, 1988, p. 10).
The entire "modern" style of aesthetics (boxy, functional, and plain) began with Bauhaus. We are still surrounded by the architecture that this philosophy produced. Bauhaus managed to develop and produce new ideas and programs, and to spread them in its own time, and the time to come - not only outside Thuringia and Germany, but also beyond the confines of Europe, becoming the global aesthetics, or the dominant style of our century. Its ambition to create and design the future was not an empty talk of mystics or utopians.
Among the people who contributed to Bauhaus creativity, were (beside Gropius) some leading artists of our century (some of them from neighbor countries): Oskar Schlemmer, Johaness Itten, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerhard Marcks, Lyonel Feininger, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche, Theo van Doesburg, Joost Schmidt, Josef Albers, Gerta Stölzl...
The core of Bauhaus ideas that will have world-wide impact, can be found in "Dessau Bauhaus - principles of Bauhaus production" (written by Gropius, 1926).
The Bauhaus seeks... to derive the form of an object from its natural functions and limitations. (...)The nature of an object is determined by what it does... it must function practically, must be cheap, durable, and 'beautiful'. (...)
Forms emerge from a determined consideration of all the modern methods of production and construction and of modern materials. (...)
For most people the necessities of life are the same. (...) Design is more a matter of reason than of passion.
(The goals are):
- Determined acceptance of the living environment of machines and vehicles.
- Exclusive use of primary forms and colors comprehensible to everyone.
- Simplicity in multiplicity, economical use of space, material, time and money.
- Prototypes suitable for mass production and typical of their time are developed with care and constantly improved.

World-wide influence

During thirteen years Bauhaus developed enough potential to influence architecture, design and art round the world, especially when the professors and (former) students dispersed. Many of them left Germany (during Nazi times), and spread (personally - and through the new generation that they educated) their knowledge, creativity and ideas, West and East. Bauhaus influenced our lives immensely, in ways that most people take for granted, because they were born in this environment.
"The 'New Bauhaus' founded by Moholy-Nagy in Chicago in 1937, the activities of Gropius at Harvard, Albers at both Black Mountain College and Yale, the establishment in 1950 of a 'Hochschule für Gestaltung' ...in Ulm... are merely the most visible results of that influence. Less easy to demonstrate but not less important is the continuing influence of Bauhaus ideas in countless art schools from London to Tokyo" (Whitford, 1988: p. 197).
Postmodern architecture and design, during the last decade, reduced this dominance, and Bauhaus aesthetic is now seen as separate, as any other style - nowadays, in postmodernism, individualism and even whimsy is increasingly prized.