House style: how Bauhaus changed the world

This was a Modernist utopian project like no other. The completed Bauhaus, with its simple cubic forms and shimmering glass surfaces, was seen to have announced a new international architectural style. The unity was striking: the different functional elements came together to form an abstract geometry, as in a De Stijl painting. To the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the building seemed "cast of one piece like a persistent thought".

But the Bauhaus could never last in early 1930s Germany. Many Bauhaus staff and students were Jewish; besides, the experimental, abstract direction of the teaching was anathema to the Nazis, who, by 1931, had taken control of the Dessau municipal council. The following autumn, the Bauhaus was closed down, and the Nazis sacked the building, breaking the windows and throwing out the workshop tools. Only international protest prevented them from razing the whole site.

An attempt was made to resurrect the Bauhaus in Berlin in a disused telephone factory. But soon after it reopened, Hitler became chancellor; the Nazi regime was entrenched in opposition to an institution viewed as "one of the most obvious refuges of the Jewish-Marxist conception of 'art'". On April 11 1933, Berlin police raided the premises. Photographs show Bauhaus students being loaded into trucks.

By the time of the closure, many of the staff associated with the Bauhaus in its great creative period were dispersing. Gropius had resigned in 1928. Klee left for Bern and Kandinsky for Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1933. Albers emigrated to America in 1933, where he taught at Black Mountain College in Chicago and developed a foundation course based on the original ideas of the Bauhaus. Moholy-Nagy went to Chicago, where in 1937 he founded his own art institution, the "New Bauhaus", which, like its successor, the Chicago Institute of Design, adopted and expanded Gropius's original curriculum. The Nazis' banning of the Bauhaus only gave its ideas greater international impetus.

London was the first stopping point for many of the émigré masters, who arrived with a touching faith in Britain's liberal traditions. Gropius and his wife, Ise, arrived in 1934, followed by Breuer the next year; together they formed the nucleus of a Bauhaus community in exile at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead. Wells Coates's early reinforced concrete block of flats was one of very few buildings in London that bore any relation to Modernist ideals.

Disappointingly, Britain in the mid-1930s was less in tune with the Modern than the émigrés had expected, and the opportunities for work, at a period of commercial despondency, were slim. Most travelled on to what the Modernist critic Herbert Read called "the inevitable America". But there were some who stayed, infusing British art schools with Bauhaus principles. Naum Slutsky, the brilliant metalworker who had been master goldsmith at the Weimar Bauhaus, was still teaching at Birmingham as late as 1964.

A search for the surviving Bauhaus spirit in this country would have to start at Impington, the village college in Cambridgeshire designed in 1935 by Gropius in partnership with Maxwell Fry. It was Gropius's only significant architectural commission in this country, and it came from Henry Morris, a notably eccentric and imaginative chief education officer. Morris created the concept of the village college, an education and arts centre for the whole local rural community, from childhood to old age. Gropius and Fry planned the building at Impington with functional wings splaying out from a big, broad, sociable central corridor, already a proven Bauhausian idea.

The Cambridgeshire college was a welcoming building, human in its scale. Nikolaus Pevsner, another German émigré, detected new poetic qualities in Impington: "Can it have been the effect of English picturesque notions on the more rigid intellect of Gropius?" With its splashes of bright colour and its witty porthole windows, this was Bauhaus loosened up, and it set the pattern for progressive school-building in Britain after the war.

The nation also came close to a Bauhaus way of life at Dartington in Devon. This was a fascinating social experiment initiated by Leonard Elmhirst, a Yorkshire-born disciple of Rabindranath Tagore, and his (fortunately) wealthy American wife, Dorothy. One of its main aims, which ran in parallel with Gropius's ambitions at the Bauhaus, was to "integrate the creative artist into the workaday world of realities". Dartington, too, became an avant garde international community committed to a multitude of disciplines - painting and sculpture, music, theatre, dance, modern crafts. The house for the headmaster of the progressive Dartington Hall School was designed in the white-cube Modern style reminiscent of the Bauhaus masters' houses at Dessau. The Ballets Jooss company from Essen, ejected by the Nazis in 1934, were welcomed at Dartington, and pictures of the Jooss dancers give the strange impression of the Bauhaus resurrected in the Totnes countryside.

The Bauhaus started much that we now take for granted. A revolution in the art schools of this country began in the immediate postwar period with the reconstituted Royal College of Art. The new principal, Robin Darwin, was a painter. As at the Bauhaus, the professors were themselves practising architects, artists and designers, stars in their own spheres. RCA students were specifically trained for the emerging design professions. The ethos of the RCA - attuned to new technologies, self-confident, anarchic - quickly spread to other colleges. It was this Bauhausian energy and commitment in the art schools from the 1960s onwards that turned Britain from a predominantly literary culture to the visually alert nation we (sometimes to our surprise) now find ourselves to be.

There was a postwar sequel to the Bauhaus in Germany, too: the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, opened in 1955. The first rector, the Swiss-born architect Max Bill, a former Bauhaus student, designed the Ulm school buildings in a style best described as late-Bauhaus lookalike. The school had ties to Braun AG, the leading German domestic equipment manufacturers. Braun's beautiful, functional wall clocks, food mixers, radios and record players became, like prewar Bauhaus furniture, their period's cult objects; clean-lined to the point of anonymity, they defined modern design for a generation.

I have always loved Bauhaus's peculiar combination of solemnity and regimented craziness. Over the years, I have met a number of ex-Bauhaus masters, and I visited Ise Gropius, Walter's wife, in the wonderful Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, shortly before her death in 1982. But it was not until last spring that I saw the Dessau buildings, which had for many years been marooned in communist East Germany. I now understand what Rayner Banham meant when he called the Bauhaus at Dessau "a sacred site". What made it so moving? Not just the architectural coherence of the school and the masters' houses nearby in the pine woods, but the weight of its history. Bauhaus ideas survived to shape the modern world.

· Bauhaus 1919-1933 is at Mima, Middlesbrough, from November 23 to February 17

Weimar
The school was founded by Walter Gropius at the conservative city of Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts. His opening manifesto proclaimed "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist".

Most of the contents of the pre-war Weimar workshops had been sold during World War I. The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. Much internal and external conflict followed.

Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of the war. He 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 pretensions. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called "Bauhaus" and a series of books called "Bauhausbücher". Since the country lacked the quantity of raw materials that the United States and Great Britain had, they had to rely on the proficiency of its skilled labor force and ability to export innovative and high quality goods. Therefore designers were needed and so was a new type of art education. The school's philosophy basically stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.

Thuringian Parliamentary support for the school came from the Social Democratic party. In February 1924, the Social Democrats lost control of the state parliament to the nationalists. the Ministry of Education placed the staff on six-month contracts and cut the school's funding in half. they had already been looking for alternative sources of funding. Together with the Council of Masters he announced the closure of the Bauhaus from the end of March 1925.

The appearance of Theo van Doesburg and his criticism affected the director, Walter Gropius. He now realised that what was being taught by Johannes Itten, Expressionism, was not what he intended. The latter eventually left the school and Moholy Nagy took over as the Vorkus.

After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of industrial design with teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative political regime remained in Weimar. This school was eventually known as the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, and in 1996 changed its name to Bauhaus University Weimar

A perfect place for home truths

The stunning Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art is hosting a definitive exhibition celebrating the power of the Bauhaus and, at the same time, putting Ms Beeny and friends in their place

Laura Cumming
Sunday December 2, 2007
The Observer


Bauhaus 1919-1933 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; until 17 February

How shall we live? Television has an answer and it couldn't be less philosophical: we shall live in a house with white walls, neutral carpets and a master bedroom with bathroom en suite, as instructed by Sarah Beeny. We shall do this because we are all on the great property ladder of life and resale is our ultimate ambition. To which end, in a further ruling from Beeny's rivals Allsopp and Spencer, we shall never, ever buy a house in Middlesbrough.


For Middlesbrough, according to the insufferable Location, Location, Location, is Britain's worst place to live. Do not be hoodwinked by the urban regeneration, it says, or the new green-grass square or the beautiful, 10-month-old Institute of Modern Art (Mima), which are pretty much pearls before swine if the programme's poll is to be believed; it is all crime, chemical factories and substandard education.
Middlesbrough has understandably risen up against Allsopp and Spencer, demonstrating once more what these presenters never seem to learn, which is that people are led by the heart more than the experts when it comes to living and that white walls do not a home make - both points that are vividly, and serendipitously, made in historical terms in a show at the gleaming new Mima.

No Modernist movement, no school of art, has ever believed in the possibility of redesigning life through art with anything like the fervour of the Bauhaus. The masters of the Bauhaus knew how we should live. Art and design would rationalise space, unclutter the environment, revolutionise the homes of the workers. Everything would fit, correlate, fold away; light would enter, surfaces would shine and the mind would be free for progress. Architect Marcel Breuer even dreamed of eliminating the impediment of furniture altogether. Henceforth, weary Germans would return home and sit themselves down on columns of rising air.

Thudding back to earth, the chairs Breuer actually designed, on display at Mima, cannot possibly look radical today. Tubular steel, strap and chrome, polished plywood with an angled slat for a back - the influence of Bauhaus furniture has long since worked its way through middle-class homes from Weimar to Woking, and to see Joseph Albers' seat in beech and maple, or Nina Kandinsky's stool - a disc supported by four cylinders of black polished elm - is to feel you are passing through Heal's.

Some of the early chairs were positively dangerous, with their metal protrusions and poles, and not a single piece was ordered when the Bauhaus school took its show round Germany in the 1920s. Yet furniture became the most acceptable product of the Bauhaus, at least when toned down and commoditised. The market, after all, cannot stand too much discomfort when it comes to seating a person at a table. Breuer's columns of air never took off, unlike his (and now Ikea's and Beeny's) modular shelving.

But what is especially good about this exhibition is that it comes at the Bauhaus from less routine angles. The opening years, for instance, are so far removed from what we think of as the sharp-edged, machine-based Bauhaus style as to seem practically Arts and Crafts. At Mima, you can see tapestries that try to look as if they, too, are made of polished wood, but that can't help reverting to cosy wool. And a 1922 samovar, effortfully handmade under the bullying instruction of the early master Johannes Itten, is all elongated Rennie Mackintosh ovals. Itten's hatred of all things industrial soon had him fired by the steely Walter Gropius.

Rooms lined and shelved entirely with plywood; sugar, salt and coffee in identical black and white canisters in identical black-and-white rooms; carpets designed on mathematical principles - the show gives a strong sense of how it must have felt to be boxed into a Bauhaus home; Gropius even thought that seven feet was quite high enough for the average worker's room. The future, as it were, was written on the wall. An accompanying exhibition of contemporary photographs shows that although some are now ruined or converted into hairdresser's shops, most of the comparatively few Bauhaus buildings ever built are preserved by their owners like museums: frigid living for extremists.

If only people themselves could have been redesigned, certain problems would have been swiftly solved - the conundrum, for instance, of heating. An interior shot of Paul Klee in his Bauhaus atelier, famously painted black, is let down by those big bulging radiators. And if one wonders how Klee's quirky genius could possibly have thrived in such a rigid environment, it is worth remembering what the picture doesn't show: that his rooms were generally littered with the leaves, twigs, insects and so forth brought home from his joyous walks through the Weimar woods.

It still feels strange to think of Klee and Kandinsky as Bauhaus fixtures, even though so much of the school's philosophy was based on the kind of period mumbo jumbo they believed in. This show doesn't go far enough into theosophy, anthroposophy or the crank theories invented by the Bauhaus itself - Gropius's Lords of Art, Itten's purification rituals - or its utopian socialism, but it does show the Kandinsky of the 1920s in a very good light. In the Small World prints, one sees how well the quintessential Bauhaus medium could control the increasing wispiness of his watercolours. Miniature milieux, hinting at spires, planets and towns, with nautical and rural variations, they are poised on the edge of Abstraction instead of collapsing meaninglessly into it, and how like Paul Klee they look.

The Buddha of the Bauhaus, as Klee was known, though never as far gone as his neighbour, is inevitably the star of this show. In a wall of works, you see his gift for selecting, balancing and orchestrating lines to perfection - from swarms of coded symbols up the tightropes, down the ladders, through the tiny grids and musical staves that act as a kind of underlying grammar. With their jokes and exclamations and tiny signatures alighting on the surface like interested insects, they are fields of graphic energy that still feel quite free from the rigours of the Bauhaus. There is even a tragicomic work here, Burdened Children, which in this context seems to evoke both the tangle of trying to get one's arms through one's sleeves and the misery of strictures and rules.

The architecture of the Mima building feels liberating in itself. A rising sweep of glass set off by interior curtains and external sails of white lime, it sits in its wide green gardens with long views. The entrance gallery alone is as high and airy as any at Tate Modern and when you reach the fourth floor, an unexpected aperture in a wall gives a bird's-eye view of that gallery so that you suddenly see those first Bauhaus chairs as if they were blueprints, just as they were conceived in the first place. It is a museum-class show and this is a first-class museum. Middlesbrough must be proud.