49 Fun Facts About Bauhaus

Which motto is most closely tied to Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus's last director?

Less is more. Mies made the phrase the creed of stripped-down modernism, and the postmodernist Robert Venturi later answered it with a jibe of his own: 'Less is a bore'.

The word Bauhaus translates literally from German as what?

Building house. Gropius's 1919 manifesto called building the ultimate aim of all artistic activity and told architects, sculptors and painters to go back to working with their hands.

Which painter of 'Twittering Machine' taught at the Bauhaus for a decade from 1921?

Paul Klee. He left in 1931 for a professorship in Düsseldorf, but when the Nazis took power two years later they had him sacked at once and he went home to Switzerland.

Which American university hired Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to teach architecture in 1937?

Harvard. Gropius had slipped out of Hitler's Germany in 1934 and crossed the Atlantic three years later, and the students he went on to teach there included I. M. Pei.

Why did the city of Dessau sack Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer in 1930?

His left-wing politics. The city dismissed him for 'Communist machinations', and within months he had left for the Soviet Union, taking a group of former Bauhaus students with him.

After the Gestapo sealed the Berlin Bauhaus in April 1933, who took the final decision to dissolve it?

Its own teachers. The Gestapo offered to let the school reopen on Nazi terms, but that July Mies van der Rohe and his fellow masters voted to shut it for good rather than accept them.

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

Tel Aviv. European-trained Jewish architects who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s built its White City in the new style, and UNESCO made the district a World Heritage Site in 2003.

Which craft workshop did the Bauhaus drop when it moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925?

Pottery. The workshop sat in a master potter's yard at Dornburg, out in the country beyond Weimar, so when the school left for Dessau it was simply left behind.

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

William Morris. Gropius's 1919 Bauhaus manifesto took up his cause, calling for 'a new guild of craftsmen' with no class barrier between the craftsman and the artist.

Which Belgian Art Nouveau architect put forward Walter Gropius to succeed him in Weimar?

Henry van de Velde. As a Belgian in wartime Germany he had to step down in 1915, and four years later the school he left behind was folded into the new Bauhaus.

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

Johannes Itten. He followed the Mazdaznan sect and drew students into the faith, a mysticism that set him against Gropius's turn towards industry until he walked out.

Which Hungarian designer took over the Bauhaus preliminary course in 1923 and later founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago?

László Moholy-Nagy. His New Bauhaus ran out of money within a year, so in 1939 he simply opened a successor of his own, the School of Design.

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

Wassily Kandinsky. He stayed eleven years, right up to the school's closure in 1933, then moved to France and never again lived in Germany or Russia.

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

The Triadic Ballet. First staged in Stuttgart in 1922, it hid its dancers inside sculptural costumes so that they moved as geometric figures rather than as people.

Which Dutch art movement did Theo van Doesburg come to Weimar to promote among Bauhaus students in the early 1920s?

De Stijl. Van Doesburg, the movement's roving ambassador, settled in Weimar to spread its gospel of straight lines and primary colours, and its ideas left their mark on Gropius and Mies.

In Josef Hartwig's 1923 Bauhaus chess set, what does the shape of each piece show?

How it moves. Hartwig threw out crowns and horses' heads for bare cubes and spheres, so the knight is an L of cubes and the bishop a diagonal cross.

Which American writer mocked modern architecture in his 1981 book 'From Bauhaus to Our House'?

Tom Wolfe. Fresh from The Right Stuff, he blamed the school's ideas for filling American cities with stark, unadorned boxes in place of the ornate buildings he preferred.

The Bauhaus's 1926 building in Dessau is best known for which feature of its workshop wing?

A glass curtain wall. Gropius set the supporting columns back inside the building so the facade could hang like a curtain of glass, leaving the workshops on show to the street.

What major building commission did the Bauhaus win while Hannes Meyer was director?

A trade union college in Bernau. The unions had the use of it for barely three years: on 2 May 1933 the Nazis seized the building and made it a training school of their own.

Which close collaborator did Mies van der Rohe bring in to run the Bauhaus weaving workshop in 1932?

Lilly Reich. She and Mies had just fitted out the Tugendhat villa in Brno together, and she went on teaching when the school made its last move to Berlin.

Where in Berlin did Mies van der Rohe reopen the Bauhaus after its Dessau home was shut in 1932?

A disused telephone factory. With no city left to fund it, Mies ran the school there as a private institute, and it lasted only until police searched and sealed the building in April 1933.

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

Flat roofs. The architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, star speaker of Alfred Rosenberg's Nazi culture league, led the charge with his polemics against the 'Jewish-Bolshevik flat roof'.

After leaving Germany, Mies van der Rohe became head of architecture at which Chicago college?

Illinois Institute of Technology. It was still called the Armour Institute when he arrived in 1938, and he went on to design its entire new campus.

Fleeing Nazi Germany, Walter Gropius and two fellow Bauhaus masters regrouped in a modernist block of flats in which city?

London. They lived in the Lawn Road Flats, a concrete block in Hampstead built by the design firm Isokon, before all three moved on to the United States.

Which Bauhaus master's steel-tube chairs were inspired by bicycle handlebars?

Marcel Breuer. Newly in charge of the furniture workshop, he designed his B3 club chair in 1925 and soon set up a firm of his own in Berlin to sell steel furniture.

Which Dutch designer did Germany's top court name in 1932 as the creator of the cantilever chair?

Mart Stam. He had built the first chair with no back legs in 1926 from lengths of gas pipe, and the judges ruled it an artist's creation that belonged to him, not a mere technical trick.

What was the most profitable product the Bauhaus ever made?

Wallpaper. First printed by the Rasch company in 1929, the plain patterns paid the school a commission on sales and became the biggest of all its licence incomes.

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

The German Pavilion at a 1929 exposition. The building in Barcelona was pulled down within a year, so the chair outlived its home by half a century until a replica rose on the site in 1986.

Marianne Brandt, whose geometric teapots and ashtrays became design classics, took charge of which Bauhaus workshop in 1928?

Metal. She took over when her teacher left the school, then struck deals with manufacturers such as Kandem that put the workshop's designs into mass production.

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

Gender bias kept her out of other workshops: she had wanted glass, not thread, yet in 1949 she became the first weaver given a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Which series of paintings occupied former Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers for the last quarter-century of his life?

Homage to the Square. Every picture is three or four nested squares, and he changed only their colours, to show how one colour alters the look of the one beside it.

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

Black Mountain College. Philip Johnson arranged the job once the Bauhaus had shut; the Alberses wired that Josef spoke no English and were told to come anyway.

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

All-lowercase sans-serif type. German gives every noun a capital, and Bayer rebelled by abandoning capitals altogether, drawing a single-case alphabet he called universal.

Student Wilhelm Wagenfeld's 1924 design became so famous that it is known simply as the 'Bauhaus' what?

Lamp. The glass-domed table light made Wagenfeld's name, and he spent the next half-century designing glassware for Schott of Jena and metalware for WMF.

In which German city did Max Bill and Inge Aicher-Scholl found a design school in 1953 to carry on the Bauhaus tradition?

Ulm. The School of Design held its first classes in the adult education centre Aicher-Scholl had started there in 1946; her brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, had been executed for resisting Hitler.

Vkhutemas, the Soviet art and technical school often compared to the Bauhaus, opened in 1920 in which city?

Moscow. Founded a year after the Bauhaus with the same aim of joining craft to modern industry, Vkhutemas was the bigger school of the two, yet it lasted only until 1930.

Which New York-born painter cut the 'Cathedral' woodcut on the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto?

Lyonel Feininger. He had sailed for Europe at 16 and stayed for half a century, and Gropius made him one of the very first masters the school hired.

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

Bela Lugosi's Dead. The Northampton four first called themselves Bauhaus 1919, after the school's opening year, and cut the nine-minute track only six weeks after forming.

Which geometric typeface of 1927 was inspired by Bauhaus ideas but drawn by Paul Renner, who never taught at the school?

Futura. The school's own alphabets never got past the drawing board, so it was an outsider's typeface, built on the circle, that carried the Bauhaus look into print.

In which city did the Nazis open their 1937 'Degenerate Art' show, hanging works by former Bauhaus masters to be mocked?

Munich. More than two million people came, several times the crowd at the regime's own Great German Art Exhibition, which had opened round the corner the day before.

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

Peter Behrens. His Berlin office turned out to be a nursery of modern architecture: Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier both worked at its drawing boards as young men too.

What does 'Gesamtkunstwerk', the German word for the ideal behind the Bauhaus, mean?

Comprehensive artwork. Richard Wagner had taken up the word for operas that fused music, poetry and staging, and Gropius borrowed the dream for buildings in which every art would play its part.

Which bronze-clad New York tower of 1958 did former Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe design?

The Seagram Building. The distiller's boss had already approved another design when his daughter, Phyllis Lambert, sent him a long letter of protest and was told to find a better architect herself.

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

The School of Arts and Crafts. Joining the two was the whole idea: in the new workshops every student was taught by a pair, an artist for form and a master craftsman for technique.

What did director Hannes Meyer add to the Bauhaus timetable in 1928?

Sport and gymnastics. Meyer hired teachers specially, among them Karla Grosch, a pupil of the dancer Gret Palucca, who took the women students and also danced in Oskar Schlemmer's stage experiments.

Which Manhattan skyscraper, opened in 1963 beside Grand Central Terminal, did Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius help to design?

The Pan Am Building. For a few years in the 1960s helicopters flew passengers from a pad on its roof to the airports, a service that came back briefly in 1977.

What did the Bauhaus lack for its first eight years?

An architecture department. The manifesto had called building the aim of all the arts, yet one opened only in 1927 under the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who within a year was running the whole school.

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

The Chicago Tribune Tower. The newspaper wanted the world's most beautiful office building and chose a Gothic tower with buttresses, so Gropius's bare modern grid stayed on paper.

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius married the widow of which composer in 1915?

Gustav Mahler. Alma Mahler and Gropius had a daughter, Manon, who died young, and Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto 'to the memory of an angel' for her.