A school in three cities, 1919 to 1933.

The Bauhaus, formally the Staatliches Bauhaus, was a German art school that operated from 1919 to 1933 and combined the crafts with the fine arts. It is a historic school: the institution itself closed in 1933, and the name now belongs to the buildings, collections and successor bodies described below.

Wikipedia says the architect Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar on 1 April 1919 by merging the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art with the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts. The arts and crafts school had been founded in 1906 and was directed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. The name joined the German words for building and house, and Wikipedia says Gropius’s 1919 manifesto proclaimed that the aim of all creative activity was building.

Teaching began with a preliminary course. Wikipedia says the painter Johannes Itten taught this Vorkurs from 1919 to 1922, and that students could choose a workshop only once it was complete. Dezeen, in a profile of Herbert Bayer published on 6 November 2018 for its Bauhaus centenary series, says Bayer read Gropius’s 1919 manifesto while working for an architect in Darmstadt, enrolled in Itten’s course in 1921 and then joined Wassily Kandinsky’s wall-painting workshop.

The school moved twice. Wikipedia says it was in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, in Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and in Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three architect-directors: Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation article on Wikipedia dates the end of the school in Dessau to 30 September 1932, and Wikipedia says Mies then rented a former factory in Berlin for the school in late 1932.

Wikipedia says the school was closed in 1933 by its own leadership, under pressure from the new Nazi government. Dezeen says Bayer left the school in 1928, shortly after Gropius, and that the Museum of Modern Art in New York invited him to develop its 1938 exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1928.

A building, a university and a foundation.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau is the school’s own landmark, and it was designed by its director. Wikipedia says the city of Dessau commissioned Gropius’s office in March 1925 to design a joint building for the Bauhaus and the town’s school of arts and crafts. Construction began in September 1925, the topping-out ceremony took place on 21 March 1926 and the building was inaugurated on 4 December 1926. The school’s own workshops made much of the furniture and fittings. A five-storey wing, the Prellerhaus, held 28 studios where young masters and students lived and worked.

The building had a long second life. Wikipedia says it was partly burned in an air raid in 1945 and rebuilt in simplified form, without the glass curtain wall of the workshop wing. That wall was reconstructed in 1976, using aluminium in place of steel, and the building was restored again between 1996 and 2006. Since 2006, rooms in the Prellerhaus have been available for overnight stays.

Today the name refers to several institutions rather than one school. In Weimar, Wikipedia says the art school founded in 1860, renamed Bauhaus by Gropius in 1919, received its present name, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, in 1996. Its main building, built between 1904 and 1911 to designs by Henry van de Velde, is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau”, inscribed in December 1996. In Dessau, Wikipedia says the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation was set up on 9 February 1994 by the German federal government, the state of Saxony-Anhalt and the town of Dessau, and is based in the Gropius building.

The 2019 centenary added two museums. Dezeen reported on 11 September 2019 that the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, designed by the Barcelona studio Addenda Architects, had opened in the town. It described a glass block with an open ground floor for temporary exhibitions and a floating “black box” gallery for fragile items from the collection. Roberto González, one of Addenda’s founders, told Dezeen that the black box hovers five metres above visitors’ heads. The same report noted that the Bauhaus Museum Weimar, designed by Heike Hanada, had opened earlier in 2019 in the city where the school began. Wikipedia lists an opening festival at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin from 16 to 24 January 2019.

A school that ended, and a name that continued.

An art school’s identity rarely starts with a logo. It usually starts with a name, and that name is often a person’s: a founder who opened the first studio, a teacher whose classes drew the first students, or a benefactor whose gift paid for a building. Over decades those names get shortened, merged, abbreviated into initials or folded into a parent institution, and each change leaves a trace on letterheads, signs and diplomas.

Buildings carry as much of the identity as any mark. A converted warehouse, a purpose-built studio block or a hillside campus becomes the image people picture when they hear the name, and architects’ choices of glass, steel, brick or concrete end up doing the work a brand book would do elsewhere.

Then there are the everyday surfaces: lettering painted on studio doors, signage on stairwells, and above all the posters, catalogues and websites made each year for graduate shows. These are often designed by students or staff rather than agencies, so the look shifts from year to year while the name stays fixed. For a designer, the useful lesson is how a short wordmark has to sit comfortably beside work that changes every season.

An emblem from 1922 and an alphabet without capitals.

The Bauhaus had a recognisable emblem early on. Wikipedia says the school adopted an emblem designed by the painter and stage designer Oskar Schlemmer in 1922, and Dezeen describes it as a geometric, face-like Bauhaus logo. It dates from the school’s Weimar years.

The typographic identity came with the move to Dessau. Dezeen says that, once Bayer had completed his studies and the Bauhaus had moved, Gropius appointed him junior master of a newly formed printing and advertising workshop focused on commercial design. Part of that job was giving the Bauhaus a consistent typographic identity across its output. Dezeen says Bayer designed the lettering used on the signage of the new Dessau building, and Wikipedia’s image record shows his typography above the entrance to the workshop block. Dezeen also names the 1925 Catalogue of Samples, which set out the objects designed at the school, as a key work.

Bayer’s alphabet proposal dropped capital letters altogether. Dezeen says that for Universal an upper case was judged unnecessary, partly as a waste of time in the production and use of typewriters, and that serifs were abandoned too. Wikipedia says Bayer adopted all-lowercase sans-serif type for Bauhaus publications, and that he worked on the Proposal for a Universal Typeface from 1925 to 1930. It existed only as drawings and was never cast as metal type; the digital versions available today are later interpretations. Dezeen quotes Bayer’s own 1971 book on the subject, in which he said that few of the Bauhaus designers had been trained as typographers, which made it easier to set aside traditional ideas.

The lower-case habit spread beyond the school. Dezeen reports Bayer’s recollection that, as early as 1928, a printer in Frankfurt had been asked to do half of its work “in the style of Bauhaus”.

For a design guide, the Bauhaus shows how a school’s typography, emblem and building can become its identity, and how that identity can outlast the institution. Compare Cranbrook Academy of Art and Royal College of Art, two other art schools in this collection. For this guide we use red, yellow, blue and black with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bauhaus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.