Follow us. Sexual liberation, gender play, drinking, smoking and utter disregard for tradition are all things one might associate with the Sixties or the Eighties. But in Twenties Germany, an art school was prefiguring the cultural revolutions that were to unfold over the coming century: the Bauhaus. Founded in in the unlikely location of Weimar โ then a conservative city associated more with the high culture of Goethe and Schiller than proto-punk radicalism โ the Bauhaus emerged from the chaos of the First World War with a lofty, optimistic ambition.
Its founder, the architect Walter Gropius, and the staff he employed, wanted to reinvent society through redefining design.
They believed that to do this they had to jettison convention altogether. The Bauhaus would go back to basics, teaching its students to rediscover materials, shapes and colours and combine them in new creative ways that had nothing to do with Old Masters. It would promote a meeting of fine art and hands-on craft, encouraging collaboration between painters, sculptors, architects, typographers and photographers. It would unleash inventive, practical products into the world that were affordable, durable and beautiful.
The school only remained open for 14 years, but its impact was extraordinary. Moreover, its guiding principle that form must follow function is the lynchpin of contemporary design. The orderliness of the Bauhaus idiom might give you the impression that life at the school was equally formal. In fact, it was deeply Bohemian. Or consider the painting master Wassily Kandinsky, who was convinced that shapes had intrinsic colours: a square was red, he believed, while a triangle was yellow.
No wonder the institution kept being forced to move, first to Dessau, where it occupied the iconic purpose-built Bauhaus building, and later to Berlin after the Nazis attempted to shutter it for good. As the Bauhaus hits its centenary, head to Weimar, its birthplace in the German state of Thuringia , and discover first-hand where history โ and modernity โ was made.
