Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture, and design founded by the pioneer of modern architecture Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Its founding idea was to unite the fine arts, craft, and industrial production into a single whole serving the needs of mass society; the principle "form follows function" (a phrase coined by the American architect Louis Sullivan) and the rejection of superfluous ornament defined the face of twentieth-century modernism. Training began with a compulsory preliminary course, and the workshops were led by outstanding artists—Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Itten, and Oskar Schlemmer. Under political pressure the school moved in 1925 to Dessau, where Gropius built for it the famous glass-and-concrete building, and later to Berlin; its final director was the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Forced to close by the Nazis in 1933, the Bauhaus saw its teachers scatter across the world and spread its ideas, permanently transforming architecture, graphic and industrial design, and art education.