The Bauhaus at Dessau


 Tension between the Bauhaus and the government in Weimar intensified when a new, more conservative regime came to power and tried to impose unacceptable conditions on the school. The director and masters all signed a letter of resignation, effective 1 April 1925, when their contracts expired. Two weeks later, students signed a letter to the government informing it that they would leave with the masters. Gropius and Dessau mayor, Dr Fritz Hesse, negotiated moving the Bauhaus to this small provincial town.
In April 1925 some of the equipment was moved from Weimar to Dessau and work began immediately in temporary facilities. A new building complex was designed and was occupied in the fall of 1926 where a reorganized curriculum was taught.


Walter Gropius, Dessau Bauhaus building, 1925-26.
This architectural landmark has a series of parts – workshops
(shown here), classroom, dormitory, and administrative structures –
unified into a whole.

During the Dessau period the Bauhaus’s identity and philosophy came to full fruition. The De Stijl and constructivist underpinnings were obvious. Instead of merely copying these movements, the Bauhaus developed clearly understood formal principles that could be applied intelligently to design problems. Abundant ideas flowed from the Bauhaus to influence twentieth-century life. The masters were now called professors and the medieval master/ journeyman/ apprentice system was abandoned. The Bauhaus was renamed Hochschule fur Gestaltung (High School for Form) in 1926.


Herbert Bayer, symbol for the glass-stained glass work-shop, 1923.
A square is divided by a horizontal line into two rectangles.
 The top triangle has the three to five ratio of the golden mean.
Each rectangle form is then divided with a vertical to
form a square and a smaller rectangle. A harmony of
proportion and balance is achieved by minimal means
with the obvious influence of De Stijl.



Herbert Bayer, proposed streetcar station and newsstand, 1924.
A concise modular unit, design for economical mass
production, combines an open waiting area,
newsstand and rooftop advertising panels.

Five former students were appointed as masters. These included:
·      Josef Albers who taught a systematic preliminary course investigating the constructive qualities of materials
·      Marcel Breuer, the head of the furniture workshop, who invented tubular-steel furniture; and
·      Herbert Bayer, who became professor of the newly added typography and graphic design workshop.
Bayer’s workshop made striking typographic design innovations along functional and constructivist lines. San-Serif fonts were used almost exclusively, and Bayer designed a universal type that reduced the alphabet to clear, simple, and rationally constructed forms. This was consistent with Gropius’s advocacy of form following function. Bayer omitted capital letters, arguing that the two alphabets are incompatible in design as two totally different signs expressed the same spoken sound. He experimented with flush-left, ragged-right typesetting without justification, which is the squaring or flushing of both left and right edges of a type.

Herbert Bayer, universal alphabet, 1925.

This experiment in reducing the alphabet to one set of geometrically constructed characters maximizes differences between letters for grater legibility. The lower letter forms show different weights. Later variations include the bold, condensed, typewriter and handwriting styles shown here.
Extreme contrasts of type size and weight were used to establish a visual hierarchy of emphasis determined by an objective assessment of the relative importance of the words. Bars, rules, points, and squares were used to subdivide the space, unify diverse elements, lead the viewer’s eyes across a page and call attention to important elements. Open composition and an implied grid and a system of sizes for type, rules, and pictorial images brought unity to the designs. Dynamic composition with strong horizontals and verticals characterize Bayer’s Bauhaus period


Herbert Bayer, exhibition poster 1926.
Type and Image are arranged in a functional
progression of size and weight from the most
important information to supporting details.


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