art history Bauhaus “Form follows function” and “Less is more.”

Bauhaus  “Form follows function”  and  “Less is more.”

 

The Bauhaus was an art school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts and was famous for the approach to design that it publicised and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933.

The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. 

The school existed in three German cities: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime. The Nazi government claimed that it was a centre of communist intellectualism. The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. Though the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world.

 

 Walter Gropius wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and consistent with mass production. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic merit. Gropius believed that in order to export innovative and high quality goods, a new types of designers were needed and so was a new type of art education. The school's philosophy stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry. Gropius explained his vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

The Bauhaus combined elements of both fine arts and design education. The curriculum commenced with a preliminary course that immersed the students, who came from a diverse range of social and educational backgrounds, in the study of materials, colour theory, and formal relationships in preparation for more specialized studies. This preliminary course was often taught by visual artists, including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers, among others.

 

Following their immersion in Bauhaus theory, students entered specialised workshops, which included metalworking, cabinetmaking, weaving, pottery, typography, and wall painting. Although Gropius' initial aim was a unification of the arts through craft, aspects of this approach proved financially impractical. While maintaining the emphasis on craft, he repositioned the goals of the Bauhaus in 1923, stressing the importance of designing for mass production. It was at this time that the school adopted the slogan "Art into Industry."

Along with Gropius, and many other artists and teachers, both Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer made significant contributions to the development of graphic design. Among its many contributions to the development of design, the Bauhaus taught typography as part of its curriculum and was instrumental in the development of sans-serif typography, which they favoured for its simplified geometric forms and as an alternative to the heavily ornate German standard of blackletter typography.

Teachers and students at the Bauhaus talked and argued about many topics: The place of art in an increasingly technological society; Were the arts a matter of individual expression? Would a new, more egalitarian society require a new, and perhaps more impersonal art? Could new forms of expression be reconciled with capitalist methods of production?

 To these questions they offered many answers, most often in the form of actual objects and works of art, nearly all of them beautiful, some masterworks, which now fill the galleries on the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, some impractical and today seen as unrealistic. The truth was that there could never be any definitive answer. Today we question how the revolutionary dreams of the Bauhaus became our everyday realities, and in some cases our everyday banalities. Critics today look at the work of the Bauhaus and try and figure out what went wrong. They ask how the glorious promise of the Bauhaus became so terribly tarnished, and in so many respects misunderstood.

With a more rational and balanced view, critics today now believe the Bauhaus means something very different. There is questioning and doubt. Not everything was practical and perfect. The way the Bauhaus represented the unifying power of geometry is something no longer generally shared. Some believe that the school may indeed still be relevant, but only the Expressionist early period, which is very different to what is normally associated with the term "Bauhaus."

With a more rational and balanced view, critics today now believe the Bauhaus means something very different. There is questioning and doubt. Not everything was practical and perfect. The way the Bauhaus represented the unifying power of geometry is something no longer generally shared. Some believe that the school may indeed still be relevant, but only the Expressionist early period, which is very different to what is normally associated with the term "Bauhaus." 

The Bauhaus idea always represented a compromise between conflicting tendencies; a fanciful, utopian spirit was balanced against a more practical-minded, forward-looking character.

In regards to women and the Bauhaus, there were constraints imposed on the school’s supposedly liberated female faculty and students. The Bauhaus at first was intended to be gender-blind. However, Gropius became alarmed by what he saw as the disproportionate number of women in a student body that never numbered more than 150 matriculates at any given moment, which prompted him to steer women away from the supposedly “masculine” architecture curriculum and toward the traditionally “feminine” crafts workshops.

 One of the most interesting parts of the Bauhaus was Kandinsky and the Yellow-Triangle, Blue-Circle, and Red-Square. It was Kandinsky's idea that there are certain fundamental associations between colours and shapes  he proposed Yellow-Triangle, Blue-Circle, and Red-Square. These associations were formulated introspectively, however, he did conduct his own survey at the Bauhaus in 1923 by distributing questionnaires to his professorial colleagues and students, and found that many of his colleagues agreed with his associations; notable exceptions were his contemporaries, Klee and Schlemmer, who favoured different form-colour combinations. In fact, Kandinsky had already embarked upon a similar attempt to identify colour form associations while still in Russia with the aim to provide the scientific underpinning for his own intuitions.

Kandinsky's Yellow-Triangle, Blue-Circle, and Red-Square equation inspired several projects at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s. The most interesting is an amazing baby cradle by Peter Keler. This unusual, and rather dangerous looking design, illustrates the association between shapes and colours, and shows that Kandinky's ideas have mainly only historical significance and that forms and colours do not have universal meaning or correspondence.

THE principles of the Bauhaus are in many ways no longer a valid model for modern design. The emphasis on hard, uncompromising surfaces characteristic of the Bauhaus can be alienating and remote. Something more comfortable is needed for everyday use. The Bauhaus was responsible for many designs for ordinary objects that look modern and that appear to do a particular task with a minimum of fuss. This simplicity can be deceptive. Often, in order to attain the purified line, essential elements have been left out.

The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm. The Bauhaus confronted tradition and developed new ways of doing things, but struggled to legitimise their new ideas. The rhetoric created by change can be more powerful than the changes themselves. If the rhetoric is really good, with lots of catch-phrases and easy concepts such as 'form follows function', and 'less is more', it can take on a life of its own. The Bauhaus had, if nothing else, terrific rhetoric.