Bauhaus Essay

5 Pages 1357 Words

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by an architect named Walter Gropius.

Gropius came from the Werkbund movement, which sought to integrate art and economics, and to add an element of engineering to art. The Werkbund movement was unable to achieve this integration, but the founding of the Bauhaus saw the solution that had previously been overlooked. The Bauhaus was founded by the combining of the Weimar Art Academy, and the Weimar Arts and Crafts School. Students at this new school were trained by both an artist and a master craftsman, realizing the desires of Gropius to make "modern artists familiar with science and economics, [that] began to unite creative imagination with a practical knowledge of craftsmanship, and thus to develop a new sense of functional design."
The school had three aims at its inception that stayed basically the same throughout the life of the Bauhaus even though the direction of the school changed significantly and repeatedly. The first aim of the school was to "rescue all of the arts from the isolation in which each then found itself," to encourage the individual artisans and craftsmen to work cooperatively and combine all of their skills. Secondly, the school set out to elevate the status of crafts, chairs, lamps, teapots, etc., to the same level enjoyed by fine arts, painting, sculpting, etc. The third aim was to maintain contact with the leaders of industry and craft in an attempt to eventually gain independence from government support by selling designs to industry. With these at its basis the Bauhaus began and influenced our lives immensely in ways that most people probably take for granted.
Since the school tried to combine art with engineering and craftsmanship, innovation ran rampant through the Bauhaus resulting in a multitude of advances affecting the most basic aspects of life. "Everyone sitting on a chair with a tubular steel frame, using an adjustable reading lamp, or living in a house partly o...