The Bauhaus is the Keith Richards of design schools: influential, legendary, and stubbornly refusing to die. The fanfare occasioned by its 100th anniversary is largely deserved—it’s still the gold standard among design schools —but the fact that it was in existence only for 14 years raises the obvious question: Why are we still talking about the Bauhaus? and a more elusive one: Why has no design school superseded its influence in the intervening century?
If we’re talking about the school, rather than the style, we need to acknowledge that there is no such thing as the Bauhaus. The school went through several manifestations during its short existence, so it is only one thing in the same way a caterpillar and a butterfly are one thing: the school that Walter Gropius started in 1919 bears little resemblance to the school Mies would disband in 1933. Gropius’s utopian vision of uniting all the arts under one roof where they could cross-fertilize was the central idea behind its founding, reminiscent of composer Richard Wagner’s earlier efforts to unify all arts via opera into “the total work of art.” This Germanic predilection for overarching visions unfortunately didn’t stop at the arts, which would later factor into the Bauhaus’s undoing.
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