Span the whole depth of the building with the structure so that each floor is a single open plate, adaptable to uses that cannot be foreseen.
Pompidou: 48 m clear span between column lines, 13 bays of 12.8 m
All the arts serve the building
Train artists as craftsmen in workshops, and unite architecture, sculpture, painting and design in the common work of building.
Gropius’s manifesto imagined the Bauhaus as a medieval lodge of craftsmen working together on a “building of the future”. Within a few years the school’s workshops had turned toward industrial prototypes (lamps, chairs, textiles, type), and its new building at Dessau (1925–26) presented the synthesis: a pinwheel of wings for workshops, classrooms and studios, the workshop block wrapped in a continuous glass curtain that turns its corners with no visible support.
Related rules
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Omit applied ornament from buildings and everyday objects: it wastes work, money and material, dates quickly, and adds nothing that fine material and exact workmanship cannot give.
With a concrete frame, a house should stand on pilotis, have a free plan and a free façade, be lit by horizontal ribbon windows, and carry a garden on its flat roof.
pilotis · free plan · free façade · ribbon window · roof garden
House a whole community in one tall slab: stack duplex flats that run through the block with light on both sides, put shops and services on an interior street half-way up, and give the roof to everyone.
Treat architecture as volume enclosed by thin planes rather than as solid mass; order it by the regular rhythm of the structure rather than by axial symmetry; and avoid applied decoration.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “All the arts serve the building”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/bauhaus-building-as-goal. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.