Old School

January 28, 2010

It’s amazing how things work in this world.  Seldom do drastic changes occur gradually in segments or stages, but rather in explosive events that send shockwaves through the present and waves of change into the future.  For this installment of THINK, we’re looking back, all the way to the year 1919.

I first heard of the [Staatliches] Bauhaus, founded in Weimar, Germany, as a student in architecture school back in 2004.  Although I was exposed to it many times throughout my collegiate experience, I didn’t completely formulate this place’s importance in design history until recently while visiting a comprehensive exhibit on the Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art.

The MoMA exhibit displayed numerous original items designed by masters and apprentices which were built during their stay at the famed institution. It was incredible to see the depth of design and craft of the products that were created by students at the Bauhaus.  These designed objects in many ways were a catalyst of an esthetic paralleling the beginning of a new architectural style that we call International or Modern (capital M, please).

However, to me, the greatest lesson to be learned from the Bauhaus is not the lasting esthetic impact on the design community, or the way design can respond and integrate into lifestyle trends, or even the way the indirect closing of the school through actions by a pre-Third Reich regime fueled the emigration of key school leaders to North America to spread the philosophy of the Bauhaus to a few of the most highly regarded academic institutions in the world. 

It’s the fact that this was a school, and these were students.  They were not experienced masters of their vocation, although they were often taught by people that history would remember as such.  Today, many of their products are cherished works of art found most commonly in museums and private collections.  If students were this productive close to a century ago, think of what they could be capable of today.