Deutscher Werkbund sets the stage
German debates about craft, industry, and standardization prefigure many questions the Bauhaus would inherit.
Read moreThe Bauhaus, from school to legacy.
The school lasted only fourteen years, but it changed shape several times. This timeline tracks the move from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, and the shifts in people, priorities, and politics that came with each phase.
Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus
In Weimar, Gropius merges art and craft institutions into a new school after the First World War.
Read moreArt and Technology — a New Unity
The 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar marks the school's public pivot from expressionist craft toward industrial production, crystallised in Gropius's slogan and the Haus am Horn model house.
Read moreHaus am Horn demonstrates total design
The exhibition house in Weimar shows how multiple workshops could collaborate on one domestic prototype.
Read moreThe Bauhaus moves from Weimar to Dessau
Political hostility in Thuringia forces the school's closure in Weimar; Mayor Fritz Hesse's invitation brings it to Dessau, where Gropius builds the campus that defines the Bauhaus image.
Read moreThe Bauhaus building opens in Dessau
Gropius's purpose-built campus — designed with twelve assistants from his private office and furnished with workshop prototypes — is inaugurated on 4 December 1926 before more than a thousand guests.
Read moreHannes Meyer replaces Gropius as director
Gropius resigns to resume private practice; his chosen successor reorients the school toward social need, scientific method, and collective production — then is dismissed two years later for communist sympathies.
Read moreMies van der Rohe takes over as director
After Meyer's dismissal, Gropius brokers the appointment of Mies van der Rohe — an architect chosen to depoliticise the school, who instead presides over its contraction and closure.
Read moreDessau closes the Bauhaus
The Nazi-controlled city council votes twenty to five to end the school, forcing Mies van der Rohe to relocate to a former telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz as a private institute.
Read moreThe Bauhaus closes under Nazi pressure
A Gestapo raid, thirty-two detained students, and impossible conditions for reopening end the institutional Bauhaus — but not the network of people and methods it produced.
Read moreMoholy-Nagy launches the New Bauhaus in Chicago
Four years after the Bauhaus closes in Berlin, László Moholy-Nagy opens its American successor in Chicago — a school that will close, reopen, rename itself, and ultimately merge with IIT, carrying Bauhaus pedagogy into the postwar American university system.
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