Design
How the Bauhaus Kept the Nazis at Bay, Until It Couldn’t
The art school’s brief run in Germany shows not a simple dichotomy, but rather how, to varying degrees of bravery, individuals tried to survive under tyranny.
“Together let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form: architecture, sculpture and painting,” Walter Gropius declared in the Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919.
There are few symbols of Modernist design and architecture more iconic that his Bauhaus building in Dessau. And the structure did become that future; the epicenter of a design approach, style, and philosophy that permeates so much of the present. And yet, for many years, the building was derelict. The future Gropius had dreamed of seemed to have bitterly failed when the school had been closed by the Nazis in 1932, and turned into a bombed-out husk by 1945.