BAUHAUS ARCHITECTURE

   Bauhaus architecture is intricately linked to the International style, which sought to redirect architectural aesthetics toward less opulent, more streamlined construction. The word Bauhaus ("House of Building") was the name of a design school that, despite its initial lack of an architectural curriculum, was fundamental in shaping modern German architecture. The German architect and designer Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar in 1919 after convincing local authorities to allow him to bring together the city's art and craft schools into one curriculum so that he could reconcile the differing tracks of art and industry into one aesthetic unit. In 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. An architectural curriculum was added there in 1927.

   Only after students studied craft art with Johannes Itten (1888-1967) could they then focus their studies on architecture, but because Itten's artistic interests were more in line with the individualized Arts and Crafts movement than Gropius's emphasis on industrial design, he was eventually replaced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and a focus on the mass production of his own crafts. The fundamental philosophical tension between the unique and the mass produced in art was magnified in architecture, which suffered from a more complex economic reality, and therefore the architects rarely were able to satisfy their dreams in Germany. Both Gropius and Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus in 1928, and Gropius went on to introduce the modern Bauhaus style of architecture in the United States. In 1932, the school was moved to Berlin, and its last director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, joined Gropius in the United States just before Adolf Hitler closed the school a year later. In the United States, both architects were instrumental in the establishment of the succeeding International style.