People of the Bauhaus
The directors, masters, workshop heads, and students who made the Bauhaus what it actually was — and how the cast changed with every phase.
Read article Germany, 1919 to 1933 The Bauhaus.
The Bauhaus.
From Weimar to the world.
The people, the buildings, the objects, and what happened after the school closed in 1933.
Three cities, three directors, fourteen years.
The Bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1919 and was forced to close in Berlin in 1933 — three cities, three directors, shifting politics.
- Weimar, 1919–25. Gropius founded the school on the premise that craft and fine art were the same discipline. The workshops began here.
- Dessau, 1925–32. The most productive phase. The building, the masters' houses, the first Bauhaus-designed products in commercial production.
- Berlin, 1932–33. Mies ran a private school for eleven months before the Nazis forced it to close. The dispersal that followed reshaped architecture on three continents.
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People who shaped the school
From Gropius and Meyer to Stölzl and Brandt — directors, painters, weavers, and typographers who gave the school its character.
Browse figuresBuildings and objects
The chair, the teapot, the building, the lamp — objects that make the ideas tangible.
Browse worksWhere the school lived and worked
Weimar, Dessau, Berlin — the cities where Bauhaus took shape.
Browse places From the collection
The people behind the work.
Anni Albers
Weaver, textile designer, and the Bauhaus graduate who proved that thread could be an architectural material — not decoration, but structure.
Read profileGunta Stölzl
The first and only woman to hold the title of master at the Bauhaus, who turned the weaving workshop into one of the school's most productive, commercially successful, and technically innovative operations.
Read profileHannes Meyer
The second director, frequently skipped, who turned the Bauhaus toward social function, collective work, and measurable need — and whose tenure produced some of the school's most significant built architecture.
Read profileHerbert Bayer
Student turned typographer and graphic designer who ran the Bauhaus printing workshop in Dessau and shaped the school's visual identity through posters, publications, and the Universal Alphabet.
Read profileJohannes Itten
The Swiss artist who created the Vorkurs — the Bauhaus's most influential pedagogical invention — and whose departure in 1923 marked the school's pivot from Expressionism to industrial modernity.
Read profileJosef Albers
Student, glass workshop leader, and the longest-serving Vorkurs instructor — the person who carried Bauhaus pedagogy from Weimar to Black Mountain College to Yale.
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