From architecture to furniture, typography to textiles, the Bauhaus exerted a transformative influence on twentieth century art and design. Founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, the school aimed to sweep away the ornamentation and pretensions of the pre-World War I world, and institute a new design ethic centered on simplicity, functionality, and craft. By 1933, when the school was forced to close under pressure from the Nazis, it had undergone a number of changes: to its location (from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin), its leadership (from Gropius to Hannes Meyer to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and its focus (from workshop output toward an emphasis on functional design for industrial mass production). What aesthetic and philosophical concerns motivated the artists and designers of the Bauhaus, and how were they related to the political and cultural transformations that shaped Weimar Germany? How is the Bauhaus’ legacy reflected in postwar art, design, and—more generally—understandings of art’s relationship to everyday experience, to capitalism, and to political projects?
In this course, we will examine key cultural artifacts, aesthetic strategies, and theoretical texts associated with Bauhaus students and faculty. We will consider the school’s experimental pedagogy and famously vibrant extracurricular life, and ask how changes in location, leadership, and political circumstances shaped its institutional priorities. We will also explore the Bauhaus’ relationship to the broader phenomenon of modernism, to consumerism, and to other avant-garde movements and schools (particularly VKhUTEMAS). What, we will ask, can the Bauhaus teach us about art’s ability to anticipate or produce new forms of consciousness? In addition Gropius, Meyer, and Mies, students will explore works and texts by Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Gunta Stölzl, László Moholy-Nagy, Marianne Brandt, and Anni Albers, among others.
“The Bauhaus: Architecture, Design, and Theory” will also run in-person at BISR Central on Tuesdays, starting January 28th.
This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.
Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.