Founded in war-wrecked Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius and forced to close by the Nazis fourteen years later, the Bauhaus set out to end the divorce between art and industry. Its workshops — staffed by painters including Klee and Kandinsky — taught furniture, typography, weaving, and architecture together under one rule: strip ornament away and let form follow function. When the school's exiled masters carried its ideas to America, they became the foundation of the International Style, which critics later attacked as a cold, placeless corporate uniform.
It lasted only fourteen years before the Nazis forced it to close, yet the Bauhaus may be the school that taught the twentieth century how to look. Founded in 1919 in the ruined, hungry Germany left by the First World War, it set out to end the old divorce between the artist and the machine. Its workshops put painting, furniture, weaving, and architecture under one roof, and its teachers included some of the greatest painters of the age. From them came a single radical idea: that a chair, a lamp, a font, or a skyscraper should be stripped of ornament and shaped honestly for its use, then mass-produced cheaply enough to improve ordinary lives. When Nazi pressure forced the school to close in 1933, its masters fled abroad and carried that idea with them. The clean, functional look of modern buildings, furniture, and gadgets descends, in large part, from one short-lived German academy.