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A school that has significantly exceeded the function of a mere educational institution and has fundamentally influenced the shape of contemporary design and the very system of education at art schools. From the beginning, the Bauhaus was a significant centre of avant-garde art, architecture and design. It was synonymous with innovation, experimentation, home to important artists, theorists and architects, and the dream of a unified collective work. It was also the world's first university of modern architecture, alongside the Soviet Constructivist institutes, and the first school dedicated to industrial design. The modernist Bauhaus school was created by merging the Weimar Academy of Arts with the School of Arts and Crafts, thanks to the idea of the architect Walter Gropius. Gropius was its director, but he was also the author of the project for the construction of the legendary school in Dessau, where the school moved in 1925. This Bauhaus building is still one of the famous icons of modern architecture today.
Gropius's aim was to restore the close relationship between art and craft, to combine applied art with fine art and theory with practice. To create a new industrial aesthetic called design. This aim was matched by a comprehensive educational system, unique for its time, which included not only architecture, urbanism and graphic design, but also fashion, painting, dance and theatre. All disciplines, both artistic and craft, were to work together to produce a common end result. The Bauhaus developed modern photography, posters and collages, designed and produced modern tableware in glass, ceramics and metal, constructed furniture from bent chrome-plated steel tubes and bent wood, wove carpets and produced theatrical costumes and set designs.
The students first went through craft workshops where they learned the necessary basics in order to subsequently focus on architecture in their upper years. The names of outstanding artists and architects, such as Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer and later Mies van der Rohe as director, have been associated with the name of the school from the beginning. It was these personalities as teachers who ensured the Bauhaus's fame and also its outstanding results.
The Bauhaus is not just a school, an educational institution, it is a movement and an ideological direction characterized by revolutionary design, simplicity, efficiency and aesthetically pleasing and functional objects accessible to the general public.
by Barbora Kovářová
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