Page 29 - Studio International - September 1968

A new beginning was made in 1919. It was called the Bauhaus. It letter of engagement registered with the local trades council.
was certainly modernism institutionalized, programmed, and pack- I insisted on manual instruction, not as an end in itself, or with
aged for the market. any idea of turning it to incidental account by actually producing
The Bauhaus was merely a school, and a state school at that, and it handicrafts, but as providing a good all-round training for hand
faced in due course all of the difficulties of an educational institution and eye, and being a practical first step in mastering industrial
of liberal persuasion controlled by a public body. Founded by the processes.
architect, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was an amalgam of two exist- The Bauhaus workshops were really laboratories for working out
ing schools in the Grand Duchy of Weimar. It was dedicated to the practical new designs for present-day articles and improving
`working unity of the Arts'. Gropius's conception was the creation of models for mass production. To create type-forms that would meet
a community of artists, craftsmen, and apprentices (students), 'a all technical, aesthetic and commercial demands required a picked
band of active collaborators whose orchestral cooperation symbolizes staff. It needed a body of men of wide general culture as thor-
the cooperative organism we call society.' His was an architectonic oughly versed in the practical and mechanical sides of design as
ideal, romantically conceived. in its theoretical and formal laws ....
Gropius announced the opening of the school in extravagant terms: Our object was to eliminate every drawback of the machine with-
`Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without class distinctions out sacrificing any one of its real advantages.
which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. To- We see the Bauhaus, then—and Gropius saw it retrospectively—as a
gether let us conceive and create the new building of the future, technical school intended to work cooperatively with industry. There
which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one is no eradication of the distinction between artist and artisan, only an
unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a overlapping, in the educational context, of their roles and functions.
million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith.' What was accepted was that training must be alike for all, must be
In the microcosm of the Bauhaus everyone had his assigned tasks; both practical and theoretical. To this end, students studied in their
yet the purpose of the exercise was to encourage individuality within respective workshops with two masters, one responsible for practical
a system of strict responsibility. The point is that creativity was made instruction, the other for formal and speculative study. When the
part of learning. But the Bauhaus was out of step with the society that Bauhaus developed a class of graduates and had moved to Dessau,
produced National Socialism. forced out of Weimar by pressure from a right-wing government
In 1935, two years after the decease of the Bauhaus in Germany at (1925), the staff was reorganized and the workshops were led by
the hands of the Nazis, Gropius wrote : single Masters, men who had been through the course themselves.
I tried to solve the ticklish problem of combining imaginative The double function persisted in the single instructor.
design and technical proficiency. That meant finding a new and In essence, Gropius modified ideas taken from Morris and from
hitherto non-existent type of collaborator who could be moulded the Deutscher Werkbund and adapted them to the uses of modern
into being equally proficient in both. As a safeguard against architecture and industrial technology as expressed by the school.
any recrudescence of the old dilettante handicraft spirit I made He combined the rational coordination in the handling of architec-
every pupil (including the architectural students) bind himself tural problems that he had learned working with Peter Behrens with
to complete his full legal term of apprenticeship in a formal a design agency organized on quasi-guild lines. After 1925 especially,

above left Xanti Schawinsky photogramme (untitled) 1943 14+ x 14 in.
above centre Xanti Schawinsky photogramme (untitled) 1946 16⅛ x 15¾ in,

above right Josef Albers Construction 1955 7¾ x 10¼ in.
right Josef Albers Construction 1955 7¾ x 10¼ in.