Readymag Stories: Bauhaus

lthough the Bauhaus was founded by an architect who considered the merging of arts and crafts key to creating an architecture of the future, for years Gropius remained the sole architect on staff. In fact, architecture was not taught until 1927. The school’s methods developed gradually and intuitively, as Gropius recruited specialists in diverse fields whose views he found interesting – and often similar to his own. One of the school’s great early personalities was Johannes Itten, an advocate for artistic intuition, a cultic (Mazdaznanist) vegetarian, and highly sensitive, considerate teacher who designed the school’s signature introductory course. The Circle of Life describes the number and kinds of subjects studied:

It soon became clear that the previous academic system needed to be replaced by a confirmable method, not a guild process of on-the-job instruction. Nikolai Ladovsky, the architect, played a crucial role in this. He developed a psychoanalytic methodology whose primary emphasis was space, “not stone, as the basic material of architecture.” The school’s introductory course, required of all students, was based in no small measure on Ladovsky’s ideas. “Space” was supplemented by courses on “Color,” “Form,” and “Graphics.”