ARCHITECTURAL WORLD

Designed by Walter Gropius; completed 1926 Dessau, Germany Walter Gropius (1883–1969), the founder and first director of the Bauhaus, was the architect of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany, completed in 1926. This new 28,000-plus square-foot educational building, which became the symbol for the renowned avant-garde academy of design in Germany, was the second home for this architecture and design school. Gropius, whose visionary zeal created the Bauhaus School in Weimar in 1919, moved the school from Weimar to Dessau in 1925 at the invitation of Dessau’s progressive mayor, Fritz Hesse. The design of the Bauhaus was begun in 1925, after he moved to Dessau, and formally opened 4–5 December 1926. The building design exemplified Gropius’s educational philosophy, “Art and Technology: A New Unity,” which expressed the critical and inventive role of architects and designers within the seemingly chaotic and rapidly changing technological society of the times. This slogan, revised from “A...

Often misunderstood as a single entity with a consistent program and body of work, the Bauhaus was an educational program that occupied three successive sites in post-World Entries A–F 213 War I Germany: Weimar (1919–25), Dessau (1925–32), and Berlin (1932–33). Distinguished by its changes in location, direction, and faculty, the program’s turbulent history is reflected in the various articulations of the Bauhaus program that, although not wholly distinct from one another, appeared as separate phases of development. The first Bauhaus (literally, “house of building”), located in the legendary city of German arts and letters, Weimar, was founded by the German architect Walter Gropius in April 1919, several months after the surrender of Germany and the formation of the Weimar Republic. Taking up residence in a building that formerly housed Henri van de Velde’s School of Arts and Crafts, the “First Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus” (officially known as the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar) dec...