49 Fun Facts About Bauhaus

Who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919?

His neologism referenced both building and the Bauhütte, the medieval stonemasons' guild.

The word Bauhaus translates literally from German as what?

The school's manifesto declared that the aim of all creative activity was the building, though it offered no architecture classes until 1927.

The Bauhaus operated in three German cities. In what order?

Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau to 1932, and ten months in a derelict Berlin factory before the end.

Who was the third and final director of the Bauhaus, from 1930 to 1933?

He interviewed every student on arrival, dismissed those he judged uncommitted and stopped the school making goods for sale.

Why was second director Hannes Meyer dismissed by the mayor of Dessau in 1930?

Meyer had actually blocked a student communist cell, but his politics still made the school a target; some loyal students left for the Soviet Union.

Who finally closed the Bauhaus in 1933?

The Gestapo had shut the Berlin school and then agreed to let it reopen, but Mies and the faculty chose to close it voluntarily.

Which city has the highest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world?

More than 4,000 buildings in the White City were put up by German Jewish émigré architects from the 1930s; UNESCO listed it in 2003.

Which revenue-earning workshop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau?

The changes of city and director kept shifting the school's focus, technique and politics.

Which 19th-century English designer's ideas about art serving society influenced the early Bauhaus?

Gropius's 1919 pamphlet, calling for a new guild of craftsmen without class distinctions, was written under Morris's spell.

Which Belgian Art Nouveau architect ran the Weimar arts and crafts school before Gropius?

He was forced out in 1915 for being Belgian while Germany was at war with his country.

Which Swiss painter created and taught the Bauhaus preliminary course, the Vorkurs, until 1923?

Itten's mystical, Expressionist approach gave way to Moholy-Nagy's New Objectivity when he resigned.

Which Hungarian designer replaced Itten at the Bauhaus and later founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago?

His Chicago school, backed by industrialist Walter Paepcke, became the Institute of Design at IIT.

Which Russian painter, a founder of Der Blaue Reiter, joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1922?

Paul Klee had joined the year before; Breuer later built a duplicate of his tubular chair for Kandinsky's quarters.

Oskar Schlemmer, head of the Bauhaus theatre workshop, is best known for which work?

Costumed dancers became geometric shapes in what he called a party of form and colour.

What was the Bauhaus's first major joint building project, completed in 1921 for a Berlin timber merchant?

The log-built house in Berlin was in the craft-driven spirit of the early school; the Haus am Horn came in 1923.

The Haus am Horn was built for the Bauhaus exhibition of which year?

The following year the conservatives won the state election, halved the school's funding, and the Bauhaus announced it would leave Weimar.

The design school left behind in the school's first city after the 1925 move renamed itself what in 1996?

It had long been a technical university of architecture and civil engineering before reclaiming the name.

Who designed the definitive 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau?

The building and the nearby Masters' Houses made the school an 'icon of modernism'; war damage was rebuilt from 1965.

Besides five Dessau apartment blocks, what big commission did the Bauhaus win under Hannes Meyer?

The ADGB school still stands; Meyer sold clients on measurements, calculations and off-the-shelf components.

Which close confidant was the only new faculty member Mies van der Rohe appointed as director?

Reich co-designed the Barcelona chair with him for the 1929 German Pavilion.

Where did Mies set up the Bauhaus after Dessau closed in 1932?

Students painted the interior white and the school ran ten months before the Gestapo arrived.

Nazi writers attacking the Bauhaus as 'un-German' stirred controversy over which feature in particular?

The regime later cracked down on what it called the cosmopolitan modernism of 'degenerate art'.

After emigrating, Mies van der Rohe became head of architecture at which Chicago institution?

Under Philip Johnson's sponsorship he became one of the world's pre-eminent architects.

Gropius, Breuer and a third Bauhaus master regrouped in which 1930s London housing block?

From there Gropius and Breuer went on to teach at Harvard, where their students included Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei.

Marcel Breuer designed the tubular-steel Wassily chair while running which Bauhaus workshop?

The name came decades later from Italian maker Gavina, which discovered the Kandinsky anecdote while researching the chair.

Breuer lost a German patent battle over the cantilever chair to which Dutch designer?

The two had worked on the idea independently; Stam guest-lectured at the school but was never formally on staff.

What was the most profitable product the Bauhaus ever made?

The furniture became more famous, but the wallpaper paid the bills.

The Barcelona chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe and a collaborator for what?

Knoll has made it since 1964 but only named it after the pavilion in 1987.

Marianne Brandt, famous for sleek lamps and ashtrays, headed which Bauhaus workshop in Dessau from 1928?

She had trained as an Expressionist painter before turning to industrial design.

Anni Albers took up weaving at the Bauhaus for what reason?

She studied under Gunta Stölzl and became the century's leading textile artist, blurring craft and art.

Josef Albers joined the Weimar Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and became faculty in 1922 teaching what?

His later Interaction of Color, written at Yale, made him one of the most influential art teachers in America.

Josef and Anni Albers took Bauhaus teaching to which experimental North Carolina school, founded in 1933?

The college's faculty and students later included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller and Robert Rauschenberg.

Herbert Bayer gave Bauhaus publications a distinctive typographic look by using what?

His 'universal' typeface of 1925-30 was never cast in metal but influenced generations of geometric sans-serifs.

Which Bauhaus-trained designer worked for Jenaer Glaswerk, WMF and Braun?

His 1924 table lamp, made with Carl Jakob Jucker, is the classic 'Bauhaus lamp'.

Which sister of the executed White Rose resisters co-founded the Ulm School of Design with Max Bill in 1953?

The school introduced semiotics into design education and closed in 1968.

The Russian school founded in Moscow in 1920 that is often compared to the Bauhaus was called what?

It was actually the larger of the two schools, but far less known in the West.

In what year did UNESCO first inscribe the Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau on its World Heritage List?

Two more sites were added in 2017; the school's centenary in 2019 brought a year of exhibitions.

The band Bauhaus's 1979 debut single, often called the first gothic rock record, was titled what?

It came out on the Small Wonder label; the band later played it in the opening of the film The Hunger.

Who was the singer of the band Bauhaus?

After the 1983 split the other three formed Love and Rockets; Murphy formed Dalis Car and went solo.

The band Bauhaus reached the UK top 20 and Top of the Pops with a cover of which David Bowie song?

The standalone single peaked at No. 15 in 1982.

Which industrial designer, whose 1907 AEG work fused art and mass production, employed the young Gropius?

Behrens designed AEG's products, graphics and Turbine Factory, and Mies worked in his office too.

The Bauhaus was grounded in the idea of a 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. What does that German term mean?

The goal was to bring all the arts together in one whole; the school's style became one of the most influential currents in modern design.

Roughly how many Bauhaus or International Style buildings make up Tel Aviv's 'White City'?

They were built from the 1930s by German Jewish architects who fled the Nazis, and UNESCO proclaimed the ensemble a World Heritage Site in 2003.

The Bauhaus was created in 1919 by merging Weimar's Academy of Fine Art with which institution?

That arts and crafts school had been founded in 1906 by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and run by Henry van de Velde until 1915.

Under director Hannes Meyer, one day of the Bauhaus week was devoted entirely to what?

Meyer hired two physical education teachers in 1930 and even sought public funds to improve the playing field, arguing sport countered one-sided intellectual work.

By 1923 Gropius wanted 'an architecture adapted to our world of' which three things?

It marked his shift away from the 1919 manifesto's craft-guild imagery of cathedrals towards functional, cheap design suited to mass production.

Its manifesto called building the aim of all creative work, yet the Bauhaus taught no architecture until when?

In the Gropius years the school's built output was really that of his own office with partner Adolf Meyer, such as the Sommerfeld and Otte houses in Berlin.

Gropius's early Bauhaus-era work included a competition design for which American skyscraper?

That entry brought him attention alongside the Sommerfeld, Otte and Auerbach houses built with Adolf Meyer.

Which Austrian Expressionist painter shaped Johannes Itten's aesthetics in the early Bauhaus years?

Itten also drew on the educational ideas of Franz Cižek and Friedrich Fröbel and the art of the Munich group Der Blaue Reiter.