Friday, January 2, 2009

What inspires me to do what I do.

The Bauhaus

This school sums up why I went into design. I have embodied many aspects of the Bauhaus before I even knew what it was. Below you will find some factual information and a few pictures. I urge you to google the school and research some of its design. Even today many of the pieces the students produced would be considered modern. They were Germany's Ikea... but without all the particle board!

This cradle is the perfect balance of design. The three elemental shapes are here; the rectangle, circle and triangle, as well as the three primary colors. I have a series of paintings I did when i was 19 that is eerily similar to this idea. This idea would also become one of the schools "backbones" of design.

Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933.

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

The school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Hannes Meyer from 1927 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933, when the school was closed by the Nazi regime.
This chair is something out of a contemporary interiors magazine and yet it was constructed in the mid 1920's.
This is one of the most famous designs and pieces from the Bauhaus. Pick up any book or do any research and you are bound to come across this Tea Kettle. Simple, practical, perfect.

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