In 1925, as the newly elected Council of Weimar, which fell into the hands of the ultra-right, withdrew economic support and requested the resignation of several teachers, the school moved to Dessau, a little more to the east of Germany. In 1933 he was appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler and in March the Nazi Party won the elections. One of the measures taken was the closure of the school so Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the director at the time, decides to move the Bauhaus to the capital, Berlin, operating with its own funds. But, despite proclaiming his political neutrality, this attempt would survive only until April of that same year.

After the arrival of Nazism to power, many of the members of the Bauhaus decided to emigrate to the United States where they tried to give continuity to the project. László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. There were several attempts to reincarnate the school, but the one in Chicago was the one that most respected the original curriculum. In 1951, and also following the foundational guidelines, Max Bill, Swiss sculptor and architect founds in Ulm, in the south of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Hochschule für Gestaltung, the Superior School of Design, which would soon recover the denomination of Bauhaus, differentiating it from the initial with the name of Neues Bauhaus, New Bauhaus.

According to the ideas of Gropius and what was then called the Ministry of Public Education, Bauhaus was to become the main axis of a radical educational reform, which programmed the synthesis of an integral formation that organically combined the artistic-intellectual with the practical-artisanal, with the long-term vision of fostering practical cooperation between art and industry and, ultimately, a revolutionary transformation of the relationship between art and life, developing a social configuration of the very idea of creativity.

László Moholy-Nagy. Bauhaus balconies, 1925. Silver gelatin. 8,2 x 6,1 cms. Cologne, Ludwig Museum. Gruber donation. Source

In keeping with this intention of bringing together art and technique in a single discipline, they were called upon to teach masters of form and master craftsmen together and without further hierarchization. In order to configure the substantive part, the relation between form and function, being this the one that defined it, and above all to fulfill one of its most important goals as it was to become independent from the State subsidies through the sale of the products elaborated in the School, a new relation was established between the diverse areas such as architecture, photography, design, painting, sculpture, theater and ballet.

Oskar Schlemmer: The Triadic Ballet, 1924. Source

In order to create a teaching team that would allow a balance between use and aesthetics, artists such as painter and photographer Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956); painter and sculptor Gerhard Marcks (1889-1940); painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) were brought together; the painter Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943); the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944); the writer, designer, painter and art professor Johannes Itten (1888-1967); and the photographer, painter, professor and visual designer Lászlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946).

Wassily Kandinsky, Storeys, 1929. Oil on cardboard, 56 x 41 cm (22 x 16 ¼ in) New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Source

Significant was the important participation of women in this formative and creative process. Thus, we can mention the architect and interior designer Lilly Reich (1885-1947), whose work was fundamental to define what would be the Bauhaus; the painter, sculptor, photographer and industrial designer, especially in metal, Marianne Brandt (1893-1983); textile designer and weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983); textile designer and weaver and engraver Anni Albers (1899-1994); the only female architect and urban planner Lotte Beese (1903-1988); and designer and photographer Grete Stern (1904 -1999).

Lotte Beese: Self-portrait with camera (silhouette), 1927. Source

The creative strength and innovative capacity of these painters, designers, architects, photographers, teachers and sculptors seemed to Walter Gropius particularly fruitful in consolidating his plans for a restructuring in the fields of craftsmanship and mass industrial production. To emphasize the importance of the Bauhaus for all that life has been in the contemporary era it can be said that they were the founders of what we know today as graphic and industrial design. Before the Bauhaus these two professions simply did not exist.

Marianne Brandt, teapot, 1924. Source

Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Karl Jacob Jucker, table lamp. Metal versión, 1923 – 1924. Source

Marcel Breuer, lattice chair, 1922. Source

On the other hand, the school established the academic principles, the patterns and the normative bases of everything that has been the new Modern Architecture. Finally, and perhaps most transcendently, it played a fundamental role in the incorporation of a new aesthetics, based on functionality, which would encompass all areas of people's lives, "from the chair in which you sit to the page you are reading," as Heinrich von Eckardt would say.