FREE ESSAY ON THE BAUHAUS NOTES

THE BAUHAUS NOTES

Architecturearchitecture
When Walter Gropius resigned as the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, Ludwig 
Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) became its director, moving it to Berlin 
before political pressures forced it to close in 1933. In his architecture 
and furniture he made a clear and elegant statement of the International 
Style, so much so that his work had enormous influence on modern 
architecture. Taking his motto less is more and calling his architecture 
skin and bones, his aesthetic was already fully formed in the model for 
a glass skyscraper office building he concieved in 1921. 
Working with glass provided him with new freedom and many new 
possiblities. In the glass model, three irreguarly shaped towers flow 
outward from a central court. The perimeter walls are wholly transparent, 
the regular horizontal patterning of the cantilevered floor panes and 
their thin vertical supporting elements. The weblike delicacy of the lines 
of the glass model, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by 
reflection and by light changes seen through it prefigure many of the 
glass skyscrapers of major cities throughout the world. 
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Architecture architecture
Georg Muche's Haus am Horn, the model house for the Bauhaus exibition in 
1923, was the first house he had ever designed. It is an extraordinary 
little Modernist Villa, classical in its own way. As the floor plan shows, 
it was designed for a single family with young children and no servants. 
The living room stands at the centre of the house, surrounded by all the 
other, much smaller rooms and lit by clerestory windows above. The 
surrounding rooms are linked in a logical way for middle-class households 
(the man's and the woman's rooms both lead into the bathroom, the womans 
room connects with the nursery and so on).
Muche became as fascinated by the idea of low cost, quick assembly 
prefabricated buildings as Gropius and Meyer. In 1925 they designed a 
house that could be assembled simply from steel panels.
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Architecturearchitecture
When Walter Gropius resigned as the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, Ludwig 
Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) became its director, moving it to Berlin 
before political pressures forced it to close in 1933. In his architecture 
and furniture he made a clear and elegant statement of the International 
Style, so much so that his work had enormous influence on modern 
architecture. Taking his motto less is more and calling his architecture 
skin and bones, his aesthetic was already fully formed in the model for 
a glass skyscraper office building he concieved in 1921. 
Working with glass provided him with new freedom and many new 
possiblities. In the glass model, three irreguarly shaped towers flow 
outward from a central court. The perimeter walls are wholly transparent, 
the regular horizontal patterning of the cantilevered floor panes and 
their thin vertical supporting elements. The weblike delicacy of the lines 
of the glass model, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by 
reflection and by light changes seen through it prefigure many of the 
glass skyscrapers of major cities throughout the world. 
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Architecturearchitecture
]g a l l e r y[ It was clear from Gropius's Manifesto that the ultimate 
aim of the Bauhaus was architecture; the very name Bauhaus suggests it 
most strongly. Each of the school's three directors, Gropius, Meyer and 
Van Der Rohe, were above all an architect and, rightly or wrongly, the 
Bauhaus has become strongly identified with the architectural approach 
that has variously been called Modernism, The Modern Movement or the 
International Style.
The debate surrounding Modernism or the new architecture was carried on in 
terms heavy with moral conotations: truth, purity and honesty. Democracy 
even entered into it with the attempt to suppress the predominance of one 
face of the building in favor of buildings that would only be appreciated 
by walking around or through them.
The structure of the building had to be expressed clearly by its outward 
appearance. In formal terms, the horizontal was emphasised rather than the 
imposing verticals of 19th Century public buildings; flat planes were 
interlocked at right angles and surfaces were rendered white to symbolize 
purity and clarity. One of the most controversial elements in the german 
context was the use of the flat roof; the pitched roof was seen in 
conservative circles as inalienably Germanic.
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Bauhausbauhaus
The Bauhaus is not a style; it is a collection of attitudes. The Bauhaus 
was founded in Weimar Germany in 1919 by the architect [Walter Gropius]. 
The Bauhaus Manifesto was to unite the teaching of fine art, applied art 
and architecture in order to educate creative people capable of large 
sacale collaborative projects or total works of art. The word Bauhaus is 
derived from the hausbau meaning construction. Bauhaus implies not only 
building and construction but also reconstruction. Above all, the Bauhaus 
is identified with functionalism, which is now seen as the eradication of 
ornament in favour of the austere beauty of the industrial Aesthetic.
The students of the Bauhaus took part in the designing of buildings and 
fittings. They were encouraged to use their imagination and to experiment 
boldly yet never to lose sight of the purpose which their designs should 
serve. It was at this school that tubular steel chairs and similar 
furnishings of our daily use were invented. 
The theories for which the Bauhaus stood for are sometimes condensed in 
the slogan of functionalism the belief that if something is only 
designed to fit its purpose we can let beauty look after itself. There is 
certainly much truth in this belief. But like all slogans it really rests 
on an oversimplification. The best works of this style are beautiful not 
only because they happen to fit the function for which they are built but 
because they were designed by men of tact and taste who knew how to make 
an object or building fit for its purpose and yet right for the eye. 
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Bauhausfurniture
]g a l l e r y[ Bauhaus furniture design was based on the premise that it 
was necessary to develop new and radically different forms for the pieces 
of furniture that were to be accepted as the basis of the modern home. 
Traditional furniture types -the heavy armchair, the mahogany armoire and 
the bourgeois love of ornamentation were rejected.
The functionalist approach was enthusiastically embraced by the carpentry 
workshop, as was Gropius's belief that peoples needs were largely 
identical. It was therefore the workshops task to provide for those needs 
in the most definitive and economic way.
Given the shortage of housing space in and the mid 1920s fashion for 
health and hygiene, the goal was to create lightweight, adaptable, 
multi-purpose furniture in clean, hard materials, soft upholstery was 
thought to harbour dust and mites.
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Bauhausfurniture
Peter Bucking used wood for this lightweight collapsable armchair in 
1928.
This chair epitomises the Bauhaus aesthetic lightweight, low cost 
adaptable furniture for the workers housing for which it was premium. The 
advantage of this chair was that it could be stored and not seen, avoiding 
the whole aspect of clutter and maximising the use of household space. 
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Bauhausfurniture
When Hannes Meyer became director in 1928, and Breuer was succeeded as 
leader of the furniture workshop first by Josef Albers and then by Alfred 
Arndt, the workshops priorities were realigned. The aim was now to create 
low-cost multi-purpose, standard furniture. A number of ingenious folding 
or adjustable work chairs were designed, often using tubular steel and 
plywood in conjunction. Alfred Arndts chair 1929-30 which is sometimes 
attributed to Breuer, folds completely flat so that it can fold up against 
a wall.
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Bibliography
The Bauhaus School