Bauhaus School of Design

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BAUHAUS SCHOOL OF DESIGN In 1925, an architect by the name of Walter Gropius built the school that shaped modern art and architecture as we know it today. Walter Gropius, the son of an architect, was born in 1883 in Berlin. After attending the Technical Universities in Munich and Berlin, he worked in the office of Peter Behrens and later on in 1913 established a practice with Adolph Meyer. Behrens influenced his early work with the Industrial Classicism style. Gropius returned from serving in World War I and was elected chairman of the Working Council for Art and shortly after Director of the Bauhaus. He left the Bauhaus and started his own private practice when another war became pending, but eventually was forced to leave Germany for the United States. Gropius was influenced by modern technology by taking ideas such as materials and construction methods for his designs. With these new ideas from technology came ideas of team work, prefabrication, standardization and turning a building into exact calculations. The creation of the Bauhaus school dates back to 1902, Weimar, Germany, when a Belgian artist Henry van de Velde established a very controversial school of arts and crafts. Walter Gropius later combined this and an older art school, which also caused many disputes, into the Staatliches Bauhaus in 1919 which began the Bauhaus movement. Weimer became the new center of social and political ideas when chosen to write the new constitution. The Bauhaus was centralized around the idea of having workshops ranging from carpentry, metals, pottery, glass painting, wall painting, weaving, printing, wood and stone work. The architecture from the Bauhaus differed greatly from typical German gothic architecture of the time with a new functional design. In Dessau, the Nazi majority sent the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg to take over as the “seat of learning”

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