Bauhaus

The Movement

A school first, a movement by consequence. Gropius collapsed the wall between fine art and craft and said both should serve industry. Primary colors, geometric primitives, sans-serif type, photogram experiments. Closed by the Nazis in 1933 — and via exile seeded Black Mountain, IIT, Chicago, and ultimately American modernism.

Core Tenets

• Form follows function, but function is broader than utility — it includes spiritual need.
• The preliminary course strips students of prior aesthetic assumptions. Drawing is not where you begin.
• Architecture is the totalizing discipline — every other craft serves it.
• Design is for mass production, not the collector.

Aesthetic DNA

Red/yellow/blue primaries. Circles, squares, triangles as irreducible building blocks. Sans-serif lowercase (Herbert Bayer's Universal alphabet proposed abolishing capitals entirely — they were "a historical accident"). Photographic collage and photogram. Furniture as cantilevered steel geometry.

Why It's In The Canon

Every "design school" identity — the idea that you teach taste through a curriculum — is downstream of Weimar. When you hear someone say "principles" in a brand deck, that register of speech originates here. Important to study not just for the forms (now cliché) but for the pedagogical model: how a 14-year institution set the shape of a century.

Successors

• Ulm HfG — direct successor, Maldonado and Bill carrying the line
• Black Mountain College — Albers' American continuation
• Swiss International Style — the systematization-descendant

Connected To

• Walter Benjamin — contemporary theorist of mechanical reproduction
• Otl Aicher — Ulm student, Bauhaus grandchild