Exile and Dissemination of the Bauhaus: How Its Ideas Spread Around the World

In July 1933, on the night the Bauhaus resolved its voluntary dissolution, the faculty considered their respective destinations. Remaining in Germany was no longer an option.
Yet, ironically, the Nazi attempt to close the Bauhaus ended up scattering its ideas around the world. The closure was not an end, but the beginning of a dissemination.

Where the Exiles Went

Almost all of the Bauhaus faculty left Germany.
Gropius moved to London before becoming head of the architecture department at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1937. Mies van der Rohe became head of the architecture department at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology, IIT) in Chicago in 1938. Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. Josef and Anni Albers were already teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the autumn of 1933, the year the school closed. Kandinsky went to Paris, Klee to Switzerland.
If one were to mark their destinations on a map, former Bauhaus faculty members scattered across the American East Coast, the Midwest, France, Switzerland, and Palestine. And in each of their new locations, they began to cultivate the next generation of artists and designers.

Harvard and IIT—Two Lineages That Changed America

The first thing Gropius did at Harvard was to abolish the Beaux-Arts (French classical) style of education—the imitation of historical styles and individual competition. In its place, he introduced the concept of the Bauhaus preliminary course: an education that begins with an experimental exploration of the fundamentals of form, composition, space, and material. Gropius also invited his former student, Marcel Breuer, and together they re-established Harvard's architectural education.
Among their students were I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and Paul Rudolph—architects who shaped the urban landscape of post-war America.
Meanwhile, at IIT in Chicago, Mies spent 20 years designing the entire campus while creating a systematic model for architectural education that "starts from the logic of structure and material." Although Gropius and Mies had different approaches, the core Bauhaus principles of "integrating industry and architecture" and "honesty to materials" were commonly passed on to the next generation.

The New Bauhaus—Reconstruction and Challenge in Chicago

On October 18, 1937, Moholy-Nagy opened the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago. However, it was forced to close in less than a year due to a withdrawal of funding from its sponsor. An exhibition of experimental works, reportedly described as "perplexing anonymous objects," caused it to lose industrial support.
Yet Moholy-Nagy did not give up. He reconstructed it as a "School of Design" in 1939 and renamed it the "Institute of Design" in 1944. He served as director until his death in 1946 while battling leukemia. This school later merged with IIT and continues today as the "IIT Institute of Design."
Moholy-Nagy's words remain: "The New Bauhaus is not merely an institution for training designers. It aims to be the core of a cultural community."

Black Mountain College—Another Bauhaus

Black Mountain College, founded in the mountains of North Carolina in 1933, is sometimes called "America's Bauhaus." Josef and Anni Albers taught there, and the Bauhaus spirit—the integration of art, craft, and life—was re-nurtured on American soil.
In the summer of 1948, Buckminster Fuller prototyped his first geodesic dome there. John Cage introduced chance and silence into music there. Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly studied there. The Bauhaus idea of "the school as a place for experimentation" became the breeding ground for American avant-garde art.
For 24 years until its closure in 1957 due to financial difficulties, Black Mountain continued to function as "a place without boundaries."

The "White City" of Tel Aviv—Bauhaus Blooming in the Desert

Among the architects who fled Nazism were Jewish architects who went to Mandatory Palestine. The buildings they erected in Tel Aviv are known as the "White City" and stand as the world's largest collection of Bauhaus/International Style architecture, numbering over 4,000 structures.
To cope with the intense Mediterranean sun, windows were recessed, and the exterior walls were painted white to reflect heat. The Bauhaus principle of "honesty to material and environment" was translated into a new form within the desert climate. In 2003, UNESCO designated this urban landscape as a World Cultural Heritage site.

When an Idea Becomes a Global Lingua Franca

Less than ten years after the Bauhaus closed in 1933, its ideas were being passed on to the next generation at Harvard, IIT, Chicago, North Carolina, and Tel Aviv. In Japan, Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki studied at the Dessau Bauhaus in the 1930s, and upon their return, nurtured talents like Yusaku Kamekura, who would lead post-war Japanese graphic design.
Today, the design principles we take for granted—deriving form from function, honesty to materials, prioritizing structure over ornamentation—are the accumulation of what Bauhaus exiles continued to teach in classrooms around the world. The idea that the Nazis tried to extinguish by closing a single building became the global design language, crossing borders.
Deriving form from function, being honest to materials, and prioritizing structure over ornamentation. Such ideas quietly breathe in today's minimalist household items. ZACK's products also resonate with these values.
The inquiry that began in the workshops of Weimar continues to be asked in manufacturing sites today, transcending over 80 years and thousands of kilometers.

Photo: Joe Ravi / CC BY-SA 3.0. S.R. Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago (designed by Mies van der Rohe, 1956).

This article is part of the Genealogy of German Design | 100 Years of Where Function and Beauty Met archive.