Bauhaus

English

WOTD – 18 May 2018

Etymology

The Doppelwohnhaus (double dwelling house) “Fritz Lang–Thea von Harbou” in Berlin, Germany. Designed in the Bauhaus style, it was completed in 1929.

The Isokon Long Chair, a Bauhaus-style armchair designed by Marcel Breuer in 1935–1936 and manufactured by the Isokon company.

Borrowed from German Bauhaus (“house of architecture”), from Bau (“building, construction”) + Haus (“house”). The word is derived from the Staatliches Bauhaus (State School of Construction), an art school in Weimar, Germany, founded in 1919 by German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969).

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈbaʊhaʊs/
- Audio (Southern England) (file)
(General American) IPA^(key): /ˈbaʊˌhaʊs/
Hyphenation: Bau‧haus

Proper noun

Bauhaus

(architecture, design, also attributively) A modernist style characterized by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of a building or an object and its design.
- 1968, 50 Years Bauhaus: German Exhibition; Royal Academy of Arts, September 21 – October 27 1968, Stuttgart: Württembergischer Kunstverein; Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, →OCLC, page 26:
  [J]une 22 unanimous approval of the projected bauhaus building, the first of the bauhaus books appears.
- 1974, Barbara Ann Henriksen, The Bauhaus and American Art Education (unpublished M.A. dissertation), Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin, →OCLC, page 17:
  Not until the 1930's was the American public aware of the significance of the Bauhaus. Several factors contributed to this: American Bauhaus students were returning from Germany; Bauhaus design, as tubular steel chairs and lighting fixtures, were being imported from Germany; […]
- 2004, Alan Bartram, Bauhaus, Modernism and the Illustrated Book, London: British Library, →ISBN, page 49, column 2:
  While the direct impact of the iconoclastic Bauhaus typography on bookwork is limited, its indirect influence, encouraging designers such as Jan Tschichold to re-examine the whole tradition of typography and its relationship to twentieth-century life, is difficult to overestimate.
- 2012 May 3, “Exhibition in focus: Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican Art Gallery”, in The Daily Telegraph‎, London:
  The Bauhaus has long been celebrated as the most influential art school of the twentieth century. The word Bauhaus means many things to many people: some are inspired by so-called ‘Bauhaus style’ – from tubular-steel furniture to the strict geometry of primary-coloured triangles, circles and squares; others worship its position as one of the greatest emblems of the Modern movement’s ambitious desire to change the world.
- 2017 July 3, Michael Faulhaber, David Rising, “Ice Age Art, Bauhaus Buildings Highlight German UNESCO Hopes”, in U.S. News & World Report‎, :
  Two sites with cultural treasures separated by more than 40,000 years – caves with art dating to the Ice Age and buildings designed by a Bauhaus master less than 100 years ago – highlight Germany's submissions for the prestigious World Heritage Site designation by the U.N.'s cultural agency, UNESCO. […] The Bauhaus buildings in northeastern Germany were designed by the school's second director, Hannes Meyer.