History of Interior Design-Pilar Uribe Donatiu-The Bauhaus Movement

Bauhaus-enline.es (information taken from here)

In the last session we talked about the Bauhaus movement (meaning the art of constructing), originated in Germany in 1919.

Started in Weimar in 1919 until 1925 and was directed by Walter Gropius, continued in Dessau from 1925 to 1932 directed by Hannes Mayer, and finally reached Berlin in 1932 until 1933 and was directed by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe.

German government decides to include workshop in the Arts and Crafts schools and start including well known artists as teachers and directors.

The Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, are founded in 1906 and directed by Henry Van de Velde, a well known Belgian Art Nouveau architect. During this movement, they believed in the reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts (workshop).

In the Manifesto about the Bauhaus movement by Walter Gropious, he makes the statement that they had to return to the workshop. Architects, painters and sculptors should learn a new way of seeing and understanding the composite character of the building. He also stated that the unproductive “artist would no longer be condemned to the imperfect practice of the art because their skill would now be preserved in craftsmanship, where he would or may achieve excellence.

Groupious also wanted architects, sculptors and painters to return to craftsmanship as there was no difference for him between the artist and the artisan. (all students should master architecture, sculpture, painting..)

Johannes Itten, a designer, professor, writer and artist of the Bauhaus movement, taught his students in a particular way, for example that they needed to make breathing sessions before starting any class or project. He designed a uniform for his own too. He was the one to make one of the first studies of the colour wheel and he related them with feelings and atmospheres.

Paul Klee (1879 to 194), was a German, surrealist artist. In 1920 Walter Groupus offered him a teaching place in the Bauhaus, he wanted him to help him join the art and the manual jobs. They wanted to make objects with high design characteristics. “The process determines the shape”. “The movement defines the shape of the design”. He had dynamic drawings with arrows, lines and colours.

The structure of the plain has to be alive, it needs to have a wide variey of rithms. Construction is used as a playful thing, developing negative motifs like “Un paseo en familia”.

Art was not the aim of Bauhaus, they wanted to make it a tool that could help teaching other designers and artists.

In my opinion, I do agree with some concepts of the Bauhaus manifesto. One of them is the fact that he considered that artists, designers and sculpturers should go back to the workshop. I also see eye to eye with the statement saying that artists and artisans were no different from each other. Moreover, going back to Paul Klee and his beliefs, when he says that “movement defines the shape of the design”, I could understand his point if he made reference to experimentation, meaning that the way to define the final shape of the design is through experimentation and the process which changes the shape through it. What catches my attention about the Bauhaus movement is the rather “minimalistic” aesthetics that the buildings have, if we take a look at the Bauhaus of Dessau for example. Geometric shapes, the right amount of colours or the distribution of the building.