The BAUHAUS of Walter Gropius & Co.

Europe is living the end of First World War, with the German Kaiser abdicating and forming a new Republic with the capital Weimar,

The Germans on the battlefields, confident in their moral superiority, returned defeated and betrayed as the Kaiser had had to negotiate peace with its enemies.

But in the middle of this destructive borage, the German find hope that a new order could be created through a new expression of Art. And there is where Walter Gropius called for the unification of the Arts, but there was the absence of a convincing German republic.

The Bauhaus, which means in German “House of Construction” was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimar after the First World War, is the union of the Ducal School of Crafts and the Ducal Superior School of Plastic Arts.

Walter Gropius maintained that the artist and the architect must also be craftsmen, in the early years the teaching consisted of a preparatory course of six months dedicated to workshop practices with various materials: stone, wood, metal, clay, glass, dyes and fabrics, along with notions of drawing and modeling, there was where students had to manifest that material was more attractive to him and for a better ease of work.

By 1923 the School was very well known, they asked

him to build work and they decided to build a family house, with a square floor plan, in which several small rooms were grouped around a larger one, this work received many choices by a large number of critics.

But that did not prevent the opposition of the conservatives will force them to close it, because it was considered by many as of socialist character.

The school was dissolved in April 1925. But now this did not stop this school and thanks to its recognition it was able to continue its work but this time in the city of Dessau. It is there where the school building was built, a very revolutionary and modernist, which had three buildings in the form of “L” each. It is here where the School achieves its greatest recognition. In 1928 Gropius ceased to direct the School, on Gropius’ own recommendation, he was succeeded by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who did so until 1930, then continued by Mies van der Rohe. Then in 1932, the School is moved to Berlin, where it is closed by the Nazis in 1933. After the closure of the School Germany continued in the political crisis that lived for some years, a crisis that worsened with the beginning of the Second World War.

Even after the School closed all its teachings remained standing. The School laid the foundations of modern architecture, through all the catalogs and publications showing products such as chairs, beds, kitchen cabinets, prototypes of advertising kiosks, lamps and fabrics with abstract drawings, catalogs were sold to industries.The new typeface created by Herbert Bayer a few smaller letters than those normally used. Among the teachers who were with the School are Walter Gropius, the architects Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer; the artists Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, and Josef Albers; renowned painters such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky; and the weaver Anni Albers. And the painter and lithographer Herbert Bayer.