
This is the last week youâll be reading about the Bauhaus this year (on this site, anyway)âwe promise.
In Germany and beyond, itâs safe to say that art and design history enthusiasts are feeling a little Bauhaus fatigue after 2019âs flurry of centenary celebrationsâand the countless exhibitions, symposia, and new publications tethered to the influential art and design school. Weâve heard a lot about how the Bauhaus ushered in a modern way of thinking about arts and crafts, developed a new model of design pedagogy, and left a tremendous impact on urbanism and the concept of the union of form and function.
At Eye on Design, weâve published quite a few stories about the Bauhaus ourselves this yearâespecially when it comes to the schoolâs approach to graphics and typography. And although weâre feeling our own sense of fatigue, weâve decided to throw one last Bauhaus bash on the site before the year is over, because itâs probably going to be a while before we get to write about Walter Gropius, LĂĄszlĂł Moholy-Nagy, Anni Albers, and the rest of the gang again. To say goodbye, this week weâre republishing our Bauhaus highlights, taking one last look at the best exhibitions, monographs, and features about the school.

The Bauhaus was also very much at the forefront of our minds while putting together our latest Eye on Design magazine, which is themed âUtopias.â In our Utopias issue, we look back at the movement before we look forward, and ask the question, âDo singular, idealistic visions of modern design still have a place in our world?â We start our online Bauhaus Week today with an opinion piece that asks a similar question. In a time when the schoolâs founding philosophies have been flattened into aesthetic tropes, is the Bauhaus spirit rendered at best irrelevant, or at worst completely expired?
We also take a deep dive into the history of the school itselfâa look at five examples of graphic design from the Harvard Art Museumsâ digital archive. You can explore more objects yourself in the museumâs online resource, which launched in 2016 and provides access to the 32,000+ Bauhaus-related works in the collection. 200 of these works were shown between February and July of this year at Harvard Art Museums exhibition, The Bauhaus and Harvard.Â
2019âs year of Bauhaus mania has also seen the release of numerous books and monographs dedicated to students and teachers from the famous art school. The Anni Albers retrospective and catalog were especially long overdue, the latter containing essays and reproductions of the Bauhaus masterâs most important weavings, materials, sketches, and textile designs. Tomorrow, we take a look at some of these works, exploring what makes Albers a âdesignerâs artistâ with insights from Priyesh Mistry, one of the curators of the London Tate Modernâs vast 2019 retrospective of the textile artist. We also feature a review of the 2019 catalog Moholy-Nagy and the New Typography, which highlights the importance of the Bauhaus master LĂĄszlĂł Moholy-Nagyâs surprisingly little-known 1929 exhibition on the history of typography.

Several publications from the past year have also surfaced untold stories of Bauhaus women left out from most history books, including Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler. MIT Pressâs Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics, also written by Otto, similarly traces how unsung stories from marginalised groups have haunted the Bauhausâ history. Tomorrow on Eye on Design, weâre republishing our own previously unknown history of a former Bauhaus student named Söre Popitz, the only woman to have pursued a career in graphics after her brief stint studying at the Bauhaus.

Throughout the year, the travelling bauhaus imaginista programme has been the most ambitious re-telling of the legacy of the Bauhaus, moving beyond the framework of the Bauhaus in Germany and exploring the schoolâs international reach. As part of the programme, symposia and exhibitions were hosted in Berlin, New Delhi, Lagos, Tokyo, SĂŁo Paulo, and beyond. The Bauhaus was in contact with other institutions across the globe, and so the extensive research project explores the Bauhausâ transnational relations and the schoolâs narratives of migration. In looking far beyond the years that the Bauhaus was active, the ongoing bauhaus imaginsta project traces the schoolâs chronology of experiments with new technologies all the way to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies and Media Lab at MIT. It also explores the translation of Bauhaus concepts into different political and geographical contexts, including India, Japan, China, Russia, and Brazil.

On Wednesday this week, we take our own look at the Bauhausâs extensions beyond interwar Germany, with a lens on graphic design education specifically. We explore the schoolâs relationship with the Seikatsu KĆsei KenkyĆ«sho (Research Institute for Life Configurations) in Japan, and we take a look at the design pedagogy of the Vkhutemas (or the Higher Art and Technical Institute) in the Soviet Union, another âlaboratory of modernityâ developed at the same time as the Bauhaus. We also look at the Bauhausâ connections with the Nation Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, which trained Indiaâs first specialist design educators in the 1960s and produced some of the countryâs most ubiquitous mid-century branding.
On Thursday, we explore the legacy of the Bauhausâ technological experiments with an oral history that traces how computer code became a modern design medium, followed by a visit to MITâs Visual Language Workshop archive and a deep dive into how Murial Cooperâs tech-focused design lab rapidly gained a reputation as a space for experimental design. For those interested in more on the multiple histories and migrating connections stemming beyond the Bauhaus, we also recommend Spector Booksâ Dust & Data: Traces of the bauhaus across 100 years.
Bear with us one more week, stock up on the aforementioned publications missing from your book shelves, and then on Friday you can join us in bidding farewell to the Bauhaus (for now). See you next centennial. 👋