Bauhaus
A school that lasted only fourteen years shaped how we live now. Its name is a word Gropius coined, borrowed from the Bauhütte, the lodge where medieval stonemasons worked. The cover of the 1919 founding manifesto was not a machine either, but Feininger's woodcut of a cathedral. On this map the names of styles usually begin as insults; this is one of the rare exceptions — they named themselves, after the oldest workshop they could think of. The first star teacher was a mystic who had his students meditate, do breathing exercises and eat vegetarian: Johannes Itten, who built the preliminary course, the Vorkurs. When he left in 1923 the school turned toward art and technology, a new unity. The picture of a cold, machine-like Bauhaus comes from looking only at the second half. Oddly, for a school founded by an architect, the department of architecture did not open until 1927, its eighth year. And the best-selling product was neither a chair nor a lamp — it was wallpaper. The Bauhaus wallpaper made with the Rasch company from 1929 passed six million rolls within a few years. The famous chairs barely sold at the time. The first Bauhaus to reach ordinary homes was a pattern on the wall. A word about the women. The first semester brought in 79 men and 84 women — more women than men. The following year, female students were effectively routed into the weaving workshop. Inside that enclosure they built the workshop into the strongest department in the school. Gunta Stölzl entered as a student in 1920 and became a master in 1928: the only woman master in fourteen years. The closing is on the record too. In August 1932 the Dessau city council voted the school out; in October it reopened in Berlin as a private institution. On 11 April 1933 the police sealed the building and 32 students were briefly detained. On 20 July the teachers voted to dissolve it themselves. The terms for reopening that arrived from the Gestapo the next day were not terms anyone could accept. It was not simply shut down — it refused the terms and closed itself. And then it did not end. Moholy-Nagy started the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937; the Alberses went to Black Mountain College; Gropius went to Harvard the same year; Mies to a technical institute in Chicago. In Tel Aviv, architects who had fled built a white city — some 4,000 buildings, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003. Because it was closed and scattered, it took root everywhere it landed. Incidentally, this school did not even name its own most famous object. The tubular steel chair Breuer thought up in 1925 from the handlebars of his bicycle is called the Wassily because an Italian manufacturer marketed it that way decades later. He did not design it for Kandinsky; Kandinsky admired it, so Breuer gave him one. International Style was likewise a name given by a museum in New York in 1932. Names are always given by a later age. The largest thing the school left behind was probably not a building or a chair but a way of teaching. The Vorkurs became the foundation course at art schools everywhere, passed through Ulm into the tools Braun made, and crossed the sea to become kosei kyoiku in Japan. Which is why this school has kept growing for longer since it closed than it ever ran.