Bauhaus - the origin of modern design

Post World War One in Germany was a culturally experimental time and out of this
era came one of the most influential and important design movements of the 20th
Century.

There is plenty of good info available on the web about the nitty gritty details about
Bauhaus, but to put things really simply bauhaus was:

A Design and Aesthetic movement that embraced modern manufacture process to
create high quality design pieces that were available to a wide group of people.
Bauhaus had a very specific simple geometric aesthetic that did away with excess
decoration, and got down to incorporating form and function into their pieces.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xYrzrqB0B8I


The Bauhaus set were design hardliners that changed aesthetics of the time from
decorative artisan produced pieces to functional aesthetically pleasing pieces of
design. Their sphere of influence included ceramics, graphic design, architecture,
interior design, furniture design and fashion.

The most important European school of design and architecture in the 20th century
was founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919. He gave his vision of the
regeneration of humankind the programmatic title of the " Bauhaus. Like the
medieval cathedral stonemasons lodges, the school was intended to unite all the
artisanal crafts under one roof: cabinetmaking, sculpture, workshops for
metalworking, ceramics, mural painting, weaving, commercial artwork, photography
and the Bauhaus theatre. A compulsory preparatory course helped students to
throw overboard what they had previously learned in order to free their senses for a
new visual and haptic exploration of the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F8zuGsX_z_Y

Weimar - Dessau - Berlin

Gropius vision underpinned the Bauhaus during its short life through various
periods of development and locations: the emphasis on craft production at Weimar,
designing for modern industrial society at Dessau from 1925 as well as the more
academic orientation of the curriculum under Mies van der Rohe in Berlin from
1932.
The National Socialists closed down the Bauhaus in the spring of 1933, but were
unable to prevent its teachings, pedagogic innovation and its free, experimental
spirit from being disseminated all over the world. The lifestyle aesthetic developed
at the Bauhaus had a profound influence on the modern living environment. Many
of its ideas, prototypes and everyday utilitarian objects have enjoyed
unprecedented success over the past 80 years. Furniture designed at the school
has become an icon of classic modern interior design.


Standard types

The New Style of Living, often designed with those living at the minimum
existence level in mind, today still represents the standard for statefunded housing.
The furniture for these peoples apartments was standardized on Bauhaus
production principles. According to Gropius, .a good thing can only have one
definitive solution, a standard type. At first, the standard type was a unique
individual piece. With the gradual reorientation of the Bauhaus towards technical
production processes at the cutting edge of industrial development (Art and
technology a new unity) it lost its individuality and from the middle of the 1920s
came to be regarded as an element in a programme of furniture that could be
combined at will.

Designers and Architects

The creators of this furniture were students from the cabinet-making and interior
design workshop which students of architecture such as Marcel Breuer, Hin
Bredendieck, Erich Brendel, Erich Dieckmann or Ferdinand Kramer also had to
attend. Many important innovations unit furniture, minimal interior design, tubular
steel furniture were developed by the directors of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius,
Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, themselves. The new spirit of
architecture evoked an open, uncluttered sense of space. The Bauhaus was the
first school of design to take into account this visual and spatial reorientation.

With their functional designs for furniture that was easy to construct and dismantle
and made from materials such as tubular steel, laminated bentwood and fabric
woven from a specially developed extra-strong yarn known as "Eisengarn, the
designers and architects of the Bauhaus invented a universal language of design
whose enduring success was based on its clarity and modernity of form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus