Bauhaus (was) Our House

Walter Gropius strongly believed that art and architecture should not be segregated. As the founder of the Bauhaus school in 1919, he promoted the idea that all creative disciplines—architecture, painting, sculpture, design, and crafts—should be unified into a single, holistic approach to building and living.

Bauhaus blurred the lines between architecture, furniture, art, and industrial design. A house wasn’t just a structure, it was a total environment, thoughtfully designed from door handles to chairs to lighting. Bauhaus buildings often featured white walls, open floor plans, flat roofs, and strip windows. What looked “plain” at the time was radically modern: an anti-elitist rebellion against clutter and ornament. Steel, glass, concrete—used proudly and visibly. It was a center of new thinking. No disguises, no illusions. Bauhaus celebrated the truth of construction. Bauhaus was the anti-decorative, in many ways.

The Bauhaus movement, as a formal institution, lasted 14 years, from 1919 to 1933, when the pressure from the Nazi regime resulted in its closure. Adolf Hitler hated modern architecture, particularly the Bauhaus and its ideals, and ultimately shut the school down. He considered Bauhaus a communist threat. During the Nazi era, one of the Bauhaus’s former buildings was used by Nazi authorities as offices. Consequently, Bauhaus pioneers moved to different parts of the world, including founder Walter Gropius, who settled in the US. Instead of ending the movement, this spread of talent allowed movement’s ideas to flourish internationally, establishing Bauhaus as one of the most influential design philosophies in modern history.

The paradox about the Bauhaus was that it embraced the machine age but without the industry to embrace its products. It was carefully making things by hand to look like they’ve been turned out by machines. Movement’s social message didn’t transition to the US. America embraced the look of Bauhaus but turned it into a corporate style for big companies and rich people. It became the opposite of what it was originally meant to be. Bauhaus went from our house, to elite house.