Germany's Bauhaus School of Design celebrates 90 years - 2009 special exhibitions honour the little academy that changed the world

From sleek glass and steel skyscrapers to the matte black minimalism of high-end stereo components to the familiar pictograms for men's and ladies' washrooms - in thousands, maybe millions of ways, the look and feel of life today traces back to a single design school in Germany that existed for only 14 years, from 1919 to 1933.

Next year's 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus–literally “house of building” or “building school”–promises to bring many books, exhibitions and seminars about its founders, its principles and its pervasive influence, but nowhere more than in the three German cities where the school operated in its brief existence: Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.

Weimar , where the Bauhaus began, was an unlikely birthplace for such a modern esthetic, and remains an unlikely - but beautiful - place to learn about it. To Germans, Weimar is better known as the late 18th-century home of two of the country's most important poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Mercifully spared major war damage in the past two centuries, it survives as a beautiful Baroque townscape, still with a population of only about 64,000, roughly the size of Belleville, Ontario, or Prince George, B.C.

It was here, in 1919, that the architect Walter Gropius founded an academy to teach the most up-to-date ideas in painting and printmaking, pottery, industrial design, interior design, weaving and textiles, typography and graphic design. Ironically, despite the school's name, architecture was not initially on the curriculum. Students wishing to learn building design were sent to work in Gropius's private architecture office.

Nor is there much indication of the Bauhaus in the look of Weimar today. In fact, the city's Bauhaus Museum, established in 1995, is not in a steel and glass pavilion but a pink stucco, two- storey building from the 18th century. Its permanent exhibition includes groundbreaking works by Gropius, colour theorist Johannes Itten, painter Lyonel Feininger and designer Marcel Breuer, as well as various pieces from the Bauhaus workshops. On view next year, from April 1 to July 5, at the museum and other venues around the town, an exhibition called “The Birth of the Bauhaus” will present Weimar as the laboratory that germinated the ideas later fully developed in Dessau and Berlin, and which subsequently gained worldwide recognition (see www.thueringen-tourismus.de)

In 1925, given the chance to have its own buildings, the Bauhaus moved to the slightly larger city of Dessau , near the Elbe river. The original Gropuis-designed school building, carefully renovated, survives there, along with a few of the “masters' houses” - one of them now a museum honouring the Dessau composer Kurt Weill - and a number of other buildings around the town. The school and houses together have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In Dessau, the focus for 2009 is on the years of the Dessau Bauhaus School: 1925 to 1932. Teacher and student works from every department and discipline–including carpentry and metalwork as well as architecture–will show the development and working methods of the “College of Design Bauhaus Dessau” and its emphasis on interdisciplinary learning and production (see www.dessau.de)

In early 1928 Walter Gropius officially resigned as director of the Bauhaus (he would eventually move to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and found a major American architecture office). Two years later the directorship passed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, familiar to Canadians as the architect of the sleek black TD Centre in Toronto. The school's modernism was too much for Nazi taste, though, and in 1932 the party moved to have the building demolished. The motion failed, but eight months later Mies shut down the school in Dessau and moved it, now as a private institution to Berlin. Within a year, however, that school was closed by the authorities and Mies was expelled from Germany.

While the school's time in Berlin may have been brief, the Bauhaus style has since thrived in that city as in very few other places. From 22 July to 4 October next year, the exhibition “Modell Bauhaus,” at the Martin Gropius Building in Berlin (see www.visitberlin.de), will present the school's design icons of the early 20th century in a joint project of Berlin's Bauhaus Archive with Weimar and Dessau.

For additional information on the Bauhaus and other Bauhaus sites in Germany along with general travel information on Germany, please visit www.cometogermany.com

December 4, 2008   Posted in: Germany