Almost everything you own that looks clean, simple and modern owes something to a German art school that existed for just 14 years. The Bauhaus opened in 1919 and was forced to close in 1933, yet in that short window its teachers and students worked out a way of designing furniture, lamps, typography, textiles and buildings that still shapes how the world looks. Tubular steel chairs, sans serif lettering, open-plan offices and the idea that a mass-produced object can be beautiful all trace back to it.
This explainer covers what the Bauhaus was, who taught there, the three cities it moved through, and the pieces of Bauhaus design you can still buy today. It is a good year to learn the story, too. 2026 marks 100 years since the school's famous building in Dessau opened its doors.
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What was the Bauhaus?
The Bauhaus was a school of art, design and architecture founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius. The name roughly means "building house." Gropius wanted to tear down the wall between fine art and craft, so students learned in workshops, working with wood, metal, glass, clay and textiles under both an artist and a master craftsman. The goal was not decoration. It was to design things for modern life and modern industry, objects that were useful, affordable and honest about how they were made.
Every student began with a preliminary course that stripped design back to basics: color, form, material and composition. Only after that did they move into a specialist workshop. That foundation course became the model for art and design schools around the world, and versions of it are still taught today.
Three cities in 14 years
The Bauhaus moved twice, both times because of politics. According to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, the school ran in Weimar from 1919 to 1925 under Gropius, until conservative local politics squeezed it out. The masters were dismissed as of April 1, 1925, and the school relocated to the industrial city of Dessau.
Dessau was its golden era. Gropius designed a new school building and a set of houses for the teaching masters, both presented on December 4, 1926. The glass curtain wall of the workshop wing became one of the most famous images in modern architecture. In 1926, the school was renamed the Hochschule für Gestaltung, or Institute of Design. Gropius stepped down in 1928, and the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer led the school until he was dismissed in 1930. The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over after that.
In 1932, the Dessau city council, now dominated by the Nazi party, voted to close the school. Mies moved it to a former telephone factory in Berlin as a private institution, but it lasted only months. After a police raid in April 1933, the teachers voted to dissolve the Bauhaus that July.
Who taught there
The Bauhaus faculty reads like a who's who of 20th century art. The painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught color and form. László Moholy-Nagy pushed the school toward photography, light and industry. Josef Albers, a former student, went on to teach the preliminary course and later carried Bauhaus ideas to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College and Yale.
Women were a major force in the workshops, even when they were steered away from architecture. Gunta Stölzl ran the weaving workshop, which became one of the school's most commercially successful. Marianne Brandt designed metal teapots, ashtrays and lamps in the metal workshop that are now museum pieces. Anni Albers, who studied weaving, became one of the most important textile artists of the century.
Bauhaus design you can still buy
Several Bauhaus designs have never gone out of production, and buying an authorized version is the best way to own a piece of the story.
The Wassily Chair was designed in 1925 by Marcel Breuer, who had come up through the school as a student, and was inspired by the bent tubular steel of bicycle frames. Its frame of chromed tubes and stretched leather straps looked like nothing else at the time. It was later named after Kandinsky, and today Knoll makes the licensed version.
The Wagenfeld table lamp, with its glass base, metal stem and mushroom-shaped opal glass shade, was created at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1924 by Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Tecnolumen still produces the authorized version, with a mouth-blown opal glass shade. It is one of the purest examples of the Bauhaus idea of a simple, functional form built from industrial materials.
Look for the Bauhaus influence everywhere else, too. Geometric sans serif type, primary colors and grid-based posters all grew out of the school's printing and advertising workshop. The rational, stripped-back approach of Dieter Rams at Braun and the bent-plywood and molded furniture of the Eames Lounge Chair era both built on that foundation.
Why the Bauhaus still matters
When the Nazis shut the school, its teachers scattered. Gropius and Breuer went to Harvard, Mies van der Rohe to Chicago, and Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. They turned Bauhaus ideas into the glass-and-steel modernism of American cities and taught a generation of architects and designers.
The buildings survived, too. The Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996, and the listing was extended in 2017 to include the school building in Bernau and the balcony access houses in Dessau. Weimar has its own Bauhaus Museum, and the Dessau building, damaged in 1945 and restored since, is open to visitors.
The Bauhaus also set up the arguments that design keeps having. The playful, colorful rebellion of Memphis design in the 1980s was, in many ways, a reaction against its strict rules.
Where to start
The easiest way into the Bauhaus is a good book. Bauhaus by Magdalena Droste, Taschen is a compact, image-heavy history that covers every workshop and teacher, and Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, published by the Museum of Modern Art, is the deeper dive, with hundreds of objects from the school's workshops. For more, see our list of the best design books every designer should own.
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