A four-page leaflet announcing a new school that would unite the fine arts and the crafts under the leadership of architecture, with a woodcut of a cathedral of light on its cover.
Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 by merging the Weimar academy of fine art with the school of arts and crafts. The manifesto, with Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a crystalline cathedral on the cover, calls on artists to return to the crafts. It declares that the building is the final aim of all creative activity; that there is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman; and that architects, sculptors and painters should work together, as the medieval building lodges had, on a “building of the future” that would unite all the arts. The accompanying programme sets out workshops, apprenticeship and a system of masters and journeymen.
The school’s romantic, expressionist beginnings gave way in the mid-1920s to an interest in industry, standardisation and prototypes for mass production. In 1925–26 it moved to Dessau into a building designed by Gropius, whose workshop wing, sheathed in a glass curtain wall that wraps its corners, became an emblem of the new architecture. Gropius’s book Internationale Architektur (1925) gathered examples of the emerging common style; the school was closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, and its teachers carried its ideas to the United States and elsewhere.
The book, part by part
I The manifesto (1919)
All the arts united in building; the return to craft; the workshop as school.
II Dessau (1925–32)
Industry, standard types and the glass-walled school building.