Bauhaus Blog 5

Sarah Galea  Unit 3 Task 1                                                             Blog 5

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus is a school of art, design and theatre. Bauhaus means building house and was founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau and Berlin Germany before it was closed down by the Nazi in 1933. 

This School’s aim was to bring equality between the applied arts and craftsmanship. They wanted to improve the education in this area of study and therefore they gave birth to a new art movement. They welcomed the machine age completely and were willing to work with new technology. Their art meets the industry and was all about simplicity, functionality as well as rationality. The social idealism of that time joins the commercial reality. Art was united in every form and there was an important development in the Modern Movement especially in architecture.

The buildings built by the Bauhaus movement have flat roofs, smooth facades and cubic shapes. Colours used are usually natural colour like white, grey, beige or black. The furniture is very functional; the most popular method of construction at the time was all about steel frame with glass walls. This type of construction was used for both residential and also commercial architecture.

These reformers where inspired by several other movements and designers, such as Peter Behrens, Henry Van de Velde, William Morris from the arts and crafts movement, the Expressionist, De Stijl and also the Constructivist. The Bauhaus’ first exhibition was held in 1923 with the name of ‘Form follows Function’. This exhibition had some unique characteristics. The works where opposed to the decorative art used in the Art Deco movement. Art was used for society’s sake and machine was used for better living.

In their manifesto they stated that are going to be a generation of artist that are solving the problems caused by industrialism in visual designs. They worked for high standards in design and education with low-cost consumer products. Gropius had employed assistants, few of them being Johannes Itten, Laszlo Moholy- Nagy and Gerhard Marcks. Some expressionist like Wassily
Kandinsky and Paul Klee also joined after some time.

 The Bauhaus movement made use of the grid and were very organized and also disciplined in all of their designs. With regards to typography Laszlo Moholy- Nagy aimed to be functional and also aimed at using type according to weight. This means that he used hierarchy system, rules and colours in order to emphasize, separate or connect the information on a page.  They made use of photomontage influenced by the Dadaist. They also started experimenting with viewpoints and composition, Hand drawn letters and photos.

Herbert Bayer become the head of the printing workshop and left a mark in the typography area.  His photomontages were almost surrealist. His designs showed direct and simple typography, no decoration and strong horizontals and verticals. His designs were very minimal and clear. Bayer created the ‘Universal’ Alphabet in 1925 which proposed that capital letters stop being used. This was the basis of other new typefaces, one of them being ‘Futura’.

In conclusion, the Bauhaus school, during its few active years left a great impact especially as we saw at the end to typography and also organization of type. We will see influence of the Bauhaus in the modern movement.

Bibliography

Meggs, P. B., 2012. The Bauhaus and the New Typography. In: Meggs' History of Graphic Design. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 326-327.

Story, T. a., 2014. The art story. [Online]
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