Read Bauhaus: A Complete History

The Bauhaus lasted only fourteen years, from 1919 to 1933, and it never had more than a few hundred students at a time, yet it changed the look of the modern world more than any other school of art or architecture. Founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius as a merger of an academy of fine art and a school of arts and crafts, it set out to heal the split between art and craft, between the artist's studio and the factory floor, and to train a new kind of maker who could design everything from a teapot to a housing estate. This book follows that ambition through its three cities — Weimar, Dessau and Berlin — and its three directors — Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — through the workshops that produced its famous chairs, lamps, textiles and typefaces, through the Dessau building that became its manifesto in glass and steel, and through the housing estates at Törten and beyond that tested whether good design could be cheap enough for workers. It follows the masters and students into exile after the school's closure in 1933, to Black Mountain, Harvard and Chicago, and to Tel Aviv, where the White City became the largest Bauhaus-influenced townscape on earth. And it is honest about the record: the label 'Bauhaus style' was largely invented after the school closed, its politics were contested from within, its most famous building leaked and overheated, and its women were channelled into weaving whether they wanted it or not. The debates are flagged where they arise, because Bauhaus buildings reward the reader who separates what the white walls prove from what the legend prefers.