seojeek

Gallery · Room 10 · Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, 1919–1933

Bauhaus

An art school that joined art and craft, then turned to design for industry.

A worn book cover: a dark photograph of round lenses and metal parts, overlaid with a large red 8 and red and cream capitals reading Bauhaus Bücher, L. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film.

László Moholy-Nagy

Bauhausbücher 8, L. Moholy-Nagy: Malerei, Fotografie, Film, 1927

Letterpress

The Museum of Modern Art, New York · View record ↗

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wall text

The Bauhaus was a German art school, founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. It set out to join art and craft. Its teachers included Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy.

By 1923 Gropius wanted an architecture for a world of machines, radios and fast cars. That year the school held its first large exhibition, with an experimental house and Joost Schmidt's poster in 120 railway stations. In 1925 it moved to Dessau, into a building Gropius designed. Marianne Brandt, who ran the metal workshop from 1928, designed lamps now seen as classics of industrial design. The school moved to Berlin in 1932, and in 1933, under Nazi pressure, its leaders closed it.

Herbert Bayer drew a universal alphabet with no capital letters, and many Bauhaus publications were set in lowercase. After the closure, Gropius taught at Harvard, Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe went to Chicago, and Josef and Anni Albers took Bauhaus teaching to Black Mountain College. Bayer and Brandt are still in copyright, so their work is not shown here.

Palette · Sampled from the works shown

  • Kandinsky yellow

    #F0BA19

  • Cover red

    #D74542

  • Deep blue

    #1E5E8F

  • Print black

    #241E19

  • Paper cream

    #D9CDBA

How to recognize it

  • Simple geometric shapes, such as rectangles, circles and spheres, with no ornament

  • Form led by function and fit for mass production

  • Plain sans-serif type, often set all in lowercase

  • Long banks of windows, rounded corners and curved chrome tubes

More works

What to borrow

  1. 01

    Choose one plain sans-serif and a short scale of sizes, and use them everywhere. Bayer's single lowercase alphabet is the extreme version of this.

  2. 02

    Start from the job. Design each component around what it must do, and cut anything that doesn't help it do that.

  3. 03

    Give the accent color to the key words only. On Moholy-Nagy's cover, red marks the series, the number and two of the three subjects, and the rest is black and cream.

Sources