Why Bauhaus is Still Relevant

The Bauhaus design school is approaching 100 years since its founding and still to this day we’re decorating our homes with the famous Wassily chair, designed by Marcel Breuer and famously named after his good friend Wassily Kandinsky. This chair was the first to use tubular steel for decorative purposes. The Bauhaus school and style is still relevant to design today, not just because of its history, but because of its philosophy that the marriage of form and function is still the back bone of taste and sophistication.  

The Bauhaus was an art school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. Gropius’s goal was to ‘create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.’ The school’s roots lay in the arts and crafts, but also combined modernism, and constructivism. In the end the reigning principles taught at the Bauhaus school were that design is in the service of the community, and the perfection and efficiency in geometry. Throughout this learning period Gropius grew weary that the school would be confined to its ideas instead of producing goods for their market. He wanted the goods produced to be accessible for all people.  

The school had multiple locations throughout the years, including Dessau, an industrial town near Berlin in 1925. During this time students turned masters included Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and Marianne Brandt. Although they had brought in teachers such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee to promote production, it was from this point on that the Bauhaus started to decline, beginning with Gropius’s resignation in 1928.

At the time that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was appointed as director, he had already designed the German pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Exposition and his famous Barcelona chair. Although he began his directorship obeying the government’s needs, things quickly spiraled as Hitl