Two Lineages, One City
The Bauhaus came to Chicago through two distinct channels, and the distinction matters more than it usually receives credit for. László Moholy-Nagy, who had directed the Bauhaus metal workshop and co-led the preliminary course from 1923 to 1928, arrived in Chicago in 1937 to found a new school that would carry the Bauhaus name and, in principle, its pedagogical method. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had directed the Bauhaus during its final years in Dessau and Berlin from 1930 to 1933, arrived the following year to lead the architecture program at a different institution — the Armour Institute of Technology, which would later become the Illinois Institute of Technology. The two men had overlapping Bauhaus credentials but fundamentally different pedagogical programs, and their respective Chicago enterprises developed along parallel rather than converging lines.
This matters because Chicago is often invoked as proof that the Bauhaus was successfully “transplanted” to the United States — that the German school, destroyed by political force in 1933, simply reconstituted itself on American soil. The documentary record tells a more complicated story. What happened in Chicago was translation, not duplication, and the translated versions bore the marks of their new institutional, cultural, and economic context at least as strongly as they bore the imprint of the original.
Moholy-Nagy’s Schools
Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus — American School of Design in October 1937 at 1905 South Prairie Avenue, with the sponsorship of the Association of Arts and Industries, a local consortium of manufacturers and cultural figures. Walter Gropius, by then established at Harvard, endorsed the use of the Bauhaus name. The school’s curriculum drew on the foundation-course principles that Moholy-Nagy had developed at the Bauhaus in the 1920s: direct material investigation, exercises in perception and spatial construction, and the integration of artistic training with technical and scientific knowledge.
The New Bauhaus lasted barely a year. The Association of Arts and Industries withdrew its funding in 1938, and the school closed. The reasons were financial rather than pedagogical — the sponsors expected quicker commercial returns from a design school than Moholy-Nagy’s exploratory, research-oriented approach was designed to produce. Moholy-Nagy reopened the school in February 1939 at 247 East Ontario Street under the name School of Design, financing it through tuition and whatever patronage he could assemble. In 1944, the school was reorganized as the Institute of Design, a name that signaled a more permanent institutional ambition.
Moholy-Nagy died in November 1946, and Serge Chermayeff succeeded him as director. In 1949, the Institute of Design merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology, giving it the institutional stability and financial backing that Moholy-Nagy had spent a decade trying to secure. The Institute eventually moved into S.R. Crown Hall — a building designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed between 1950 and 1956 — placing the design school under the same roof as the architecture program, though the two maintained separate curricula and identities.
The trajectory — founding, closure, reopening, renaming, merger — is not the story of a seamless institutional transplant. It is the story of an idea being repeatedly adapted, refinanced, and restructured to survive in an environment that did not operate by the same rules as a German state-supported art school. The pedagogy evolved accordingly. Moholy-Nagy shifted the curriculum toward photography, light, new media, and — during the Second World War — applications relevant to American industry, including camouflage design. The craft workshops that had been central to the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus were not reproduced in their original form. The American context demanded different skills, different materials, and different relationships between education and industry.
Mies at IIT
Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago career operated on a different axis entirely. Appointed director of architecture at the Armour Institute in 1938 — the year after Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus — Mies brought with him an architectural pedagogy rooted in structure, materials, and spatial proportion rather than in the holistic workshop model of the original Bauhaus. When Armour merged with Lewis Institute in 1940 to form the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mies continued as head of the architecture department, a position he held until his retirement in 1958.
Mies’s architectural curriculum at IIT did not replicate the Bauhaus. There was no Vorkurs, no workshop rotation, no dual-master system. The program emphasized the study of construction, the properties of industrial materials — particularly steel and glass — and the development of spatial composition through a sequence of increasingly complex design exercises. Faculty included Ludwig Hilberseimer, who had taught at the Bauhaus in its later years, and Walter Peterhans, who had directed the Bauhaus photography workshop. But the overall program was Mies’s own creation, shaped by his architectural convictions more than by institutional fidelity to the school he had once directed.
The IIT campus itself became Mies’s most sustained architectural project. His master plan, developed from 1939 onward, organized the campus as a grid of steel-framed buildings with glass and brick infill — a demonstration of the structural clarity and material discipline that defined his mature architecture. S.R. Crown Hall, completed in 1956 as the home of the architecture school, is the campus’s most celebrated building: a single vast space defined by four exposed steel plate girders spanning the full width of the structure, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls dissolving the boundary between interior and landscape. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001.
What Chicago Demonstrates
Chicago’s significance to the Bauhaus story is not that it preserved the original school but that it demonstrates what happens when pedagogical ideas cross national, institutional, and cultural boundaries. Moholy-Nagy’s design lineage and Mies’s architectural lineage drew on different aspects of the Bauhaus legacy, adapted them to different American conditions, and produced institutions that bore the Bauhaus imprint without reproducing the Bauhaus reality.
The design school emphasized experimental media, industrial applications, and visual research. The architecture school emphasized structure, proportion, and the discipline of building. Neither maintained the integrated workshop system, the preliminary course in its original form, or the craft-to-industry pipeline that the German school had attempted. What they carried forward was something more diffuse but arguably more durable: the conviction that design education should be grounded in direct engagement with materials, that form should emerge from constructional logic rather than from applied decoration, and that the boundary between art and technology was a problem to be worked through rather than a fixed division.
Chicago is sometimes treated as the happy ending of the Bauhaus story — the proof that good ideas survive political destruction. The reality is less tidy. The New Bauhaus failed within a year. Moholy-Nagy spent the last decade of his life fighting for funding. The Institute of Design and the architecture program developed in parallel rather than in synthesis. What survived was not an institution but a set of pedagogical principles, carried by individual teachers into new contexts where those principles were tested, modified, and — in some cases — quietly abandoned. Chicago is not the Bauhaus reborn. It is the Bauhaus translated, and the translation, as translations always do, changed the text.