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A R C H I T E C T U R E + D E S I G N P R O F I L E | W A LT E R G R O P I U S ruling Nazi party. Gropius and many leading figures of the Bauhaus—in architecture, most notably Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as Marcel Breuer—would then find refuge in the United States, where their ideas would live on, their works flourishing and their teachings shaping subsequent generations of students and practitioners. Whether segmented under the Modernist umbrella by way of International Style, Desert Modernism or Contemporary, the Bauhaus approach set in motion waves of design—and design thinking—that still remain alluringly au courant today. Over a hundred years later. The Bauhaus presented a radical new approach to design—to the process itself, and to learning how to becoming a designer. Students freely explored new materials (steel, concrete, glass), and there was emphasis on new forms that were unadorned, often starkly geometric and deployed with a singular mission—to serve humans efficiently in the brave new world of the 20th century. Recall that Germany, and the world, in 1919 was wracked by war. With the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that year, perhaps the Bauhaus pioneers felt it was an ideal time to create the world anew. In aesthetics, it was also a time when embellishment, whether the theatrical Beaux-Arts or the gilded Baroque variety, was a de facto part of design, whether one was producing a building or a teapot. Speaking of the latter, the Bauhaus was not just for budding architects. There were workshops in everything from furniture and textile design to photography, typography and even city planning. Functional design, the school held, did not happen in a silo. Unity was the school's premise: whether it was joining usability with beauty; fine art and technical precision or creative mastery across a number of disci- plines. There was also particular emphasis on transferring the painstaking standards of guild craftsmanship to the new modes of assembly line production taking place in factories. Stained glass. Stage design. Wall painting. Weaving. Carpentry and steel objects created for mass production. These were among the workshops at the Bauhaus, and it's not surpris- ing that many alumni were known for designing hit products across mediums. "If he is to work in wood, for example, he must know his material thoroughly," Grobius declared in The Theory and Organization of The Bauhaus (1923). "He must have a 'feeling' for wood. He must also understand its relation to other materials, to stone and glass and wool." Right, from top: Architect Mies van der Rohe's iconic Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, completed in 1951; Interior view, living room, Farnsworth House. Credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. The Wassily chair, created by Marcel Breuer while at the Bauhaus. Credit: Photo by Jeff Belmonte is licensed under CC BY 2.0. https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode. Bottom left: Plaque at Lawn Road Flats, a ground-breaking Modernist apartment building in Hampstead, north London, where three leading figures of the Bauhaus lived during the mid 1930s after leaving Germany. Credit: Photo by Spudgun67 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Bottom right: Title page— designed by László Moholy-Nagy—of the school's exhibition catalogue "Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923." Credit: Photo by Tobias Adam, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 28 DIGS.NET | 8.25.23