Bauhaus: Architectural and Interior Design

Founder: Kenneth Brown

The metal workshop included the development “from wine jug to lantern”, as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy summarised. Until 1922, Johannes Itten led the metal workshop, which was established with the support of the Weimar court jewellers Theodor Müller, who had already collaborated with Henry van de Velde. Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer temporarily led the workshop after Itten’s departure in 1922/1923, before László Moholy-Nagy was identified as its head until 1928. The second Bauhaus director, Hannes Meyer, restructured the Bauhaus in 1928 and combined the metal, carpentry and mural painting workshops into a furnishing workshop, which was to collaborate closely with the Building Department. The metal workshop was run by Marianne Brandt until 1929 and by Alfred Arndt from then until 1931, before Lilly Reich took over the complete furnishing department in the course of renewed profile changes and personnel cuts by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In Dessau, Rudolf Schwarz and Alfred Schäfter worked as the Masters of Craft. The Gropius architecture practice had taken a central position in education at the Bauhaus. For the first great post-war commission, the Sommerfeld house in Berlin, Gropius was inspired by the early country houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. Joost Schmidt carried out the woodcarving work, Josef Albers made the coloured stained glass windows and Marcel Breuer designed some of the furniture. The key works of the third Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in the Weißenhof development in Stuttgart, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, date from before his time at the Bauhaus but shape the image of Bauhaus architecture until this day. Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe received important impulses for their later architectural creations in the office of Peter Behrens in Berlin from 1908 to 1910. In 1910 Gropius became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, which had been founded by artists, architects and entrepreneurs in 1907, then established his own architecture practise in Berlin together with Adolf Meyer in 1910 and carried out his first main work, the Fagus Shoe Factory in Alfeld, together with Meyer in 1911.