BAUHAUS AND FURNITURE DESIGH

   The ‘Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar’ was a school of building, design and craftsmanship founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius from the amalgamation of two existing Weimar schools-the School of Art and Crafts and the Academy of Five Arts. Gropius’s aim was to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise a barrier between craftsman and artist who could conceive of building as a collective effort in which each artist-craftsman would contribute his part with a full awareness of its purpose in relation to the whole. His radical teaching programme consisted of two parallel courses-one devoted to the study of materials and crafts and the other to the theories of form and design. Students were given a preliminary course involving analyses of colour, form, materials, textures and rhythms together with training in several media to reveal their natural aptitudes. This was followed by workshops in several subjects including architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, metal, carpentry, ceramics, stained-glass and stage design.

   Throughout its history the Bauhaus was plagued by political opposition, and in 1925 the school was forced to move to Dessau by the local Thuringian Government.In1928 Hannes Meyer replaced Gropius as director,but in 1930 he was forced to resign by the Lord Meyer of Dessau in favour of Mies van der Role. The Dessau city council decided to dissolve the Bauhaus in 1932 and Mies’ attempt to continue as a private institute in Berlin was finally thwarted in 1933 when the building was surrounded and searched by the police, and thirty-two students arrested.

Between 1919 and 1928 Gropius succeeded in forming a school and movement from a diverse collection of individualists including Wassily Kandinsky,Paul Klee,Johannes Itten,Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.In the early days,carpentry was taught by Johannes Itten(1921-22),Walter Gropius(1922-25),Joseph Zachmann(1921-22)and Reinhold Weidensee(1922-25). The turning point, however, came in 1925 when Marcel Breuer was put in charge of the interiors workshop and inspired his pupils to produce the simple, functional in tubular steel and wood for which the school became known.

In 1928 Breuer was replaced by Josef Albers, and work was concentrated on experiments with bentwood, in particular folding chairs of bentwood and tubular steel. Under the supervision of Alfred Arndt(1929-1932),these experiments were taken even further in the direction of design anonymity, for Arndt believed that because of the current economic climate the primary task of the workshop was to develop inexpensive furniture for manufacture by automated methods. Arndt and his students worked out standardized parts and studied methods of mass-production, moving away from a reliance on tubular steel to cheaper hybrids of wood and metal or pure wood designs.

Bauhaus furniture was described by Marcel Breuer as ‘nothing but a necessary apparatus for contemporary life’. Its freely curving forms and daring structural arrangements belong to the machine aesthetic which the school helped to promote.