The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus where very keen industrialists who believed that design was for everyone. However even though they wanted to bring design to the masses they still had a very sexist approach to who should be designing, for example there was only one female Bauhaus master and the rest where men and the few woman that where allowed to attend the Bauhaus school where limited to work in certain subject areas as such textiles and colour as it was deemed the “girly” thing to do.

“Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists”- Walter Gropius. This quote I found very interesting as Walter Gropius talks about creating a place to drop the barriers between being an artist and being a craftsman which I think is a really interesting way at looking at the problems of the time. However he fails to acknowledge that woman could being just as good a craft man as the men of that time and is therefore contradicting himself as there is now a new barrier no longer depending of if you’re a artist of a craftsman but depending on your sex which I think is a very demeaning towards women.

The Bauhaus masters believed that the building was just as important as the subject they where teaching, 

“The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building.”And due to this they derived a system to work around the building with each student having to work on an introduction stage first where they would learn the basics and key skills, after this they would start to choose the specialized area in which to work.

Below is the crystal tower which was designed by a student from the Bauhaus in 1921, as you can see the idea was to have a building made of steal and glass which was a clash from the dust and the filth which was around at the time and the design is still very modern, as you can see parallels with the building next to it. The Urbis building is found in Manchester, again it uses glass and steel and looks like it is rising out of the ground.