Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was the school of art, design and architecture opened in Weimar in 1919 under Walter Gropius, built on the idea that craft and industry should be taught together instead of as separate disciplines. It moved to Dessau in 1925, into the building Gropius designed for it, passed under Hannes Meyer in 1928 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930, and was closed in Berlin in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi government.

Its workshops in metal, furniture, textiles, wall painting and printing produced objects that became reference points of modern design, such as the WG24 table lamp that Wilhelm Wagenfeld designed in 1924 as a student and later taught at the school, alongside teaching by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. The Dessau buildings, the collection and the archive are now held by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and the school’s teaching model still shapes design education today. Its short life, and the emigration of its teachers to Britain and the United States, carried those ideas into design schools worldwide.