Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889-1954) was the second director of the Bauhaus (then at its Dessau location) from 1928 to 1930. Though he held the post but briefly, Meyer made substantial changes to the school's educational program and teaching approach, notably by prioritizing concrete social issues in the design process. Building on recent research, this book offers an in-depth assessment of Meyer's major contributions to the Bauhaus curriculum, investigating the intellectual background to his approach through contributions from 31 authors, including former teachers and students at the school. With over 250 illustrations, the book also examines the impact of Meyer's work beyond the Bauhaus, specifically at the Ulm School of Design (founded by one of Meyer's former students, Max Bill) and in Mexico, where Meyer worked for the government's Instituto del Urbanismo y Planificación from 1939 to 1941.

Art historian Éva Forgács's book is an unusual take on the Bauhaus. She examines the school as shaped by the great forces of history as well as the personal dynamism of its faculty and students. The book focuses on the idea of the Bauhaus - the notion that the artist should be involved in the technological innovations of mechanization and mass production - rather than on its artefacts. Founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius and closed down by the Nazis in 1933, the Bauhaus had to struggle through the years of Weimar Germany not only with its political foes but also with the often-diverging personal ambitions and concepts within its own ranks. It is the inner conflicts and their solutions, the continuous modification of the original Bauhaus idea by politics within and without, that make the history of the school and Forgács's account of it dramatic.

Introduction: a peculiar experiment -- Kinaesthetic knowing: the nineteenth-century biography of another kind of knowledge -- Looking: Wölfflin's comparative vision -- Affecting: Endell's mathematics of living feeling -- Drawing: the Debschitz school and formalism's subject -- Designing: discipline and introspection at the Bauhaus -- Epilogue

One hundred years after the founding of Bauhaus, it s time to revisit bauhaus journal as significant written testimony of this iconic movement of modern art. In this journal, published periodically from 1926 to 1931, the most important voices of the movement are heard: masters of the Bauhaus, among others, Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer, as well as Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gerrit Rietveld and many more. They address the developments in and around the Bauhaus, the methods and focal points of their own teaching, and current projects of students and masters. At the time primarily addressed to the members of the circle of friends of the bauhaus, the journal published by Gropius and Moholy-Nagy makes tangible the authentic voice of this mouthpiece of the avant-garde. The facsimile reprint is intended to give new impetus to international discussion and research on the Bauhaus, its theories and designs. The exact replica of all individual issues are accompanied by a commentary booklet including an overview of the content, an English translation of all texts, and a scholarly essay which places the journal in its historical context. Includes 14 issues with seperate commentary in transparent slipcase.

The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers in an extraordinary conversation about modern art. Bauhaus 1919-1933, published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition at MoMA, is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject by MoMA since 1938 and offers a new generational perspective on the 20th century's most influential experiment in artistic education. It brings together works in a broad range of mediums, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and costume design, and painting and sculpture - many of which have rarely if ever been seen outside of Germany. Featuring about 400 colour plates and a rich range of documentary images, this publication includes two overarching images by the exhibition's curators, Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll, concise interpretive essays on key objects by over twenty leading scholars, and an illustrated, narrative chronology.

“This is an absolute triumph—ideas, lives, and the dramas of the twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A masterpiece.” —Edmund de Waal, ceramic artist and author of The White Road The impact of Walter Gropius can be measured in his buildings—Fagus Factory, Bauhaus Dessau, Pan Am—but no less in his students. I. M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, Anni Albers, Philip Johnson, Fumihiko Maki: countless masters were once disciples at the Bauhaus in Berlin and at Harvard. Between 1910 and 1930, Gropius was at the center of European modernism and avant-garde society glamor, only to be exiled to the antimodernist United Kingdom during the Nazi years. Later, under the democratizing influence of American universities, Gropius became an advocate of public art and cemented a starring role in twentieth-century architecture and design. Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the visionary philosophy and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Pilloried by Tom Wolfe as inventor of the monolithic high-rise, Gropius is better remembered as inventor of a form of art education that influenced schools worldwide. He viewed argument as intrinsic to creativity. Unusually for one in his position, Gropius encouraged women’s artistic endeavors and sought equal romantic partners. Though a traveler in elite circles, he objected to the cloistering of beauty as “a special privilege for the aesthetically initiated.” Gropius offers a poignant and personal story—and a fascinating reexamination of the urges that drove European and American modernism.

Featuring the latest research commissioned on the occasion of the Bauhaus centenary, this book explores the global influence of the renowned Bauhaus school of arts and its famed artists. Bauhaus Imaginista marks the centennial anniversary of this fascinating and popular school of art, which championed the idea of artists working together as a community. The Bauhaus reconnected art with everyday life and was active in the fields of architecture, performance, design, and visual art. Founded by Walter Gropius, its faculty included such luminaries as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, La´szlo´ Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers. Placing emphasis on the international dissemination and reception of the Bauhaus, this book expresses the Bauhaus’ influence, philosophy, and history beyond Germany. Rethinking the school from an international perspective, it sets its entanglements against a century of geopolitical change, as many of its artists fled World War II Germany. Bauhaus Imaginista takes readers on a global visual tour of Bauhaus influence from art and design museums to campus galleries and art institutes in India, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil, Berlin, and the United States.

While modernism was publicized as a fusion of technology, new materials, and rational aesthetics to improve the lives of ordinary people, it was often out of reach to the very masses it purportedly served. Luxury and Modernism shows how luxury was present in bold, literal forms in modern designs—from lavish materials and costly technologies to deluxe buildings and household objects—and in subtler ways as well, such as social milieus and modes of living. In a period of social unrest and extreme wealth disparity between the common worker and those at the helm of capitalist enterprises generating immense profits, architects envisioned modern designs providing solutions for a more equitable future. Robin Schuldenfrei exposes the disconnect between modernism's utopian discourse and its luxury objects and elite architectural commissions. Despite the movement's egalitarian rhetoric, many modern designs addressed the desires of the privileged individual. Yet as Schuldenfrei demonstrates, luxury was integral not only to how modern buildings and objects were designed, manufactured, and sold, but has contributed to modernism's appeal to this day. This beautifully illustrated book provides a new interpretation of modern architecture and design in Germany during the heyday of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, tracing modernism's lasting allure to its many manifestations of luxury. Schuldenfrei casts the work of legendary figures such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in an entirely different light, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent to modernism's promotion and consumption.

Available now in paperback, the definitive work on Bauhaus. Bauhaus has established itself with designers and architects as a standard work and the most comprehensive collection of documents and visual material ever published on this famous school of design. Now this definitive work on Bauhaus is available in paperback. Documents in Bauhaus are taken from a wide array of sources—public manifestos, private letters, internal memoranda, jotted-down conversations, minutes of board and faculty meetings, sketches and schemata, excerpts from speeches and books, newspaper and magazine articles, Nazi polemics, official German government documents, court proceedings, budgets, and curricula. The illustrations include architectural plans and realizations, craft and industrial model designs (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, stained glass, typography, wallpaper), sculpture, paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, posters, programs, advertising brochures, stage settings, and formal portraits of such Bauhaus masters as Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Hebert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The Bauhaus movement (meaning the “house of building”) developed in three German cities - it began in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, then continued in Dessau, from 1925 to 1932, and finally ended in 1932-1933 in Berlin. Three leaders presided over the growth of the movement: Walter Gropius, from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer, from 1928 to 1930, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, from 1930 to 1933. Founded by Gropius in the rather conservative city of Weimar, the new capital of Germany, which had just been defeated by the other European nations in the First World War, the movement became a flamboyant response to this humiliation. Combining new styles in architecture, design, and painting, the Bauhaus aspired to be an expression of a generational utopia, striving to free artists facing a society that remained conservative in spite of the revolutionary efforts of the post-war period. Using the most modern materials, the Bauhaus was born out of the precepts of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, introducing new forms, inspired by the most ordinary of objects, into everyday life. The shuttering of the center in Berlin by the Nazis in 1933 did not put an end to the movement, since many of its members chose the path of exile and established themselves in the United States. Although they all went in different directions artistically, their work shared the same origin. The most influential among the Bauhaus artists were Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandisky, and Lothar Schreyer. Through a series of beautiful reproductions, this work provides an overview of the Bauhaus era, including the history, influence, and major figures of this revolutionary movement, which turned everyday life into art.