Change came in the aftermath of World War One. People began to see the prior design movements which used organic flowing forms as whimsical and too inappropriate to carry on into the post-war world. Out of this desire for change came modernism; a movement rooted in technological advancements and rebellion against tradition.
This movement quickly spread to be used in all disciplines of design including architecture, product design and even fine arts. Modernism even had an influence on literature, music and dance. The movement was all about experimentation, lack of decoration and use of bold but clean lines. Designers often attempted to push the boundaries with what new materials or techniques they could use to create things; just coming from a war, technology had advanced very quickly and now people were figuring out how to use these new technologies for themselves.
In modernist design, a prominent school emerged in Germany. Originally started in Weimar by modernist designer Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus design school quickly became world famous for their stunning and innovative designs as well as their completely new approach to teaching. The Bauhaus taught design like no other school. They encouraged all students to take up multiple disciplines before settling on the one that they wanted to design in the most. During the first few years of learning at Bauhaus students would move between disciplines such as textiles, woodworking and fine arts which helped improve their knowledge in other fields of design and ultimately made them a much more well-rounded designer. This was Gropius’ dream: to unite art, craft and technology. The school grew rapidly and expanded into a much larger building located in Dessau. Bauhaus produced a massive number of alumni in a short time and became one of, if not the most famous design schools of all time.
Unfortunately, disaster struck for Bauhaus when the Nazis gained control over Germany. The Nazi party despised the cultural change that had come to Germany under the Weimar government. They saw Bauhaus as an opposition to their traditional world view of Germany and thought of the school as a breeding ground for cultural Bolshevism. They also saw many Bauhaus designers and artists as degenerate and hoped to deplatform them by closing the school. The Bauhaus school of art was eventually forced to close by the Nazi party in 1933.
However, many Bauhaus designers left Germany with the closing down of the school and escaped to various other countries such as England or America. It is here that they continued their work and spread Bauhaus’ methods of design even after the school’s closure. In the end, while the height of modernism and Bauhaus design ended with the start of the second world war, the modernist style of design has carried its influence all the way to present day and products, and architecture alike are still being designed in this timeless style.
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