Designing Bauhaus Education

Before this winter, my acquaintance with the Bauhaus was at once literal and vague: I knew a few architects by name, I associated their work with glass and steel, and I admired and had even sat in chairs designed by Marcel Breuer. “Form follows function,” Louis Sullivan’s watchword for modern architecture, appealed more for its alliteration than for its effects as informing aesthetic principle. Acquaintance led to fascination because of two courses I took this winter. In an art history class, I learned that the Bauhaus was not only about architecture, it was a school whose teachers were some of the most important artists of the twentieth century:Wassily Kandinsky, Annie and Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Klee were members of the faculty in the German iterations of the school. My enthusiasm for the Bauhaus then intersected with my passion for photography. I took a course called Photography in the Bauhaus taught by Iris Lutz at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Iris gave us a much more detailed and precise appreciation of the Bauhaus as a school, first in Germany from 1919–1933 and then in Chicago from 1937–2001. We learned about the rigors of the “preliminary course,” which introduced students to the materials and tools of the arts. Students learned how to design and shape materials, weaving textiles on a loom, shaping wood on a jigsaw or lathe, cutting and tinting glass, transforming sheet metal using the tools of metalsmithing. Every student learned how to manipulate materials using the latest advances in technology (fig. 1). This “curriculum wheel” was the way Walter Gropius in 1922 presented the design of the four-year program he initiated at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Gropius “hoped that various forms of artistic practice—painting, sculpture, architecture, and design chief among them—could work in harmony at the new school to produce the socially oriented and spiritually gratifying ‘building of the future’” (Casciato et al. 2019). Although the program had close ties to Gropius’s work as an architect, he committed the school to a holistic