On 18 October 1937, four years after the Bauhaus dissolved itself in Berlin rather than submit to Nazi conditions for reopening, László Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus — American School of Design in Chicago. The school occupied the Marshall Field III mansion at 1905 South Prairie Avenue, a setting whose ornamental grandeur was spectacularly at odds with the modernist pedagogy it was about to house. The opening represented the most ambitious attempt by any former Bauhaus master to transplant the school’s teaching methods to American soil, and it would prove to be both more fragile and more consequential than anyone involved could have anticipated.
The invitation had come from the Association of Arts and Industries, a Chicago civic organisation that sought to improve the quality of industrial design through education. Walter Gropius, who had already reached the United States and was establishing himself at Harvard, recommended Moholy-Nagy for the position. The Association sent a telegram on 6 June 1937; Moholy-Nagy accepted in July. Gropius served as advisor to the new institution and gave his explicit permission for the use of the “New Bauhaus” name — a detail that mattered, since the name carried both prestige and expectation. The school was not merely invoking the Bauhaus as an inspiration. It was claiming direct continuity with it.
The curriculum reflected that claim. Moholy-Nagy structured the program around the Vorkurs — the preliminary foundation course that had been the Bauhaus’s most distinctive pedagogical innovation since Itten introduced it in 1919 and that Moholy-Nagy himself had reshaped during his tenure as a Bauhaus master from 1923 to 1928. Workshops in light and photography, materials, metal, typography, and commercial arts extended the foundation course into specialised disciplines. The emphasis on experimentation with new materials and technologies, on the integration of art and industry, and on training perception as a prerequisite for design practice — these were the principles Moholy-Nagy had developed at the Bauhaus and refined in his subsequent years of exile and independent practice. György Kepes, who would later found the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, joined as a founding faculty member. Approximately thirty-five students enrolled for the first semester.
The school lasted less than a year in its initial form. After its first exhibition, the Association of Arts and Industries cut funding — the reasons involved both financial pressures and a mismatch between the Association’s expectations for commercially applicable design training and Moholy-Nagy’s commitment to experimental, process-oriented pedagogy. The New Bauhaus closed in the summer of 1938. The closure might have ended the experiment entirely had Moholy-Nagy not found a new patron in Walter P. Paepcke, the chairman of the Container Corporation of America, who was building one of the most significant relationships between corporate patronage and modernist design in American business history.
With Paepcke’s backing, Moholy-Nagy reopened the school on 22 February 1939 at 247 East Ontario Street under the name School of Design. The new iteration operated with greater financial independence from any single sponsoring organisation, and Moholy-Nagy used the autonomy to deepen the experimental character of the curriculum. The school survived, grew, and in 1944 was renamed the Institute of Design — a title that reflected its maturation from an explicitly Bauhaus-derived experiment into an independent institution with its own pedagogical identity, even as that identity remained rooted in the methods Moholy-Nagy had brought from Weimar and Dessau.
Moholy-Nagy died of leukaemia on 24 November 1946, at the age of fifty-one. He did not live to see the institution he had built through two closures and three names complete the final stage of its institutional evolution. In 1949 the Institute of Design merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology, the same university where Mies van der Rohe — the man who had closed the original Bauhaus in Berlin — had been directing the architecture school since 1938. The merger brought two distinct Bauhaus lineages under a single institutional roof: Mies’s architecture program, with its emphasis on structural clarity and material precision, and Moholy-Nagy’s design program, with its emphasis on perceptual training, material experimentation, and the integration of art and technology. The convergence was not planned as a reunion, but it functioned as one — a demonstration that the Bauhaus diaspora, which had scattered the school’s masters and methods across continents, could reconstitute fragments of what had been lost into new institutional forms that outlived the individuals who created them.
The New Bauhaus and its successors did not replicate the original. No institution of exile ever does. The political conditions, the student body, the industrial context, the cultural assumptions — everything was different. What survived the crossing was not the Bauhaus as an institution but the Bauhaus as a pedagogical method: the preliminary course, the workshop system, the conviction that perception could be trained and that the training of perception was the foundation of design. Moholy-Nagy carried that method from Berlin to Chicago, and in Chicago it entered the American educational system, where it influenced generations of designers, photographers, and artists who may never have heard of Weimar or Dessau but whose education was shaped, at several removes, by what happened there.