The Bauhaus, a design school founded a century ago this month in Germany, lasted just 14 years before the Nazis

That legacy was eventually eclipsed by subsequent movements — most notably postmodernism, a transition satirized in Tom Wolfe’s 1981 polemic “From Bauhaus to Our House.” But now, at the Bauhaus’s centennial, the school is once again being celebrated worldwide.

Not only are new museums devoted to the Bauhaus opening their doors in Weimar and Dessau — the two cities in eastern Germany where it briefly prospered before being chased away by rightward political shifts — but countless exhibitions, symposiums and newspaper articles (including this one) are attempting to explain its significance.

The building that housed the Bauhaus art school from 1925 to 1932 in Dessau, Germany, is today a museum. The founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, designed the structure.CreditSean Gallup/Getty Images

Part of the Bauhaus’s appeal is simply its historical context, and its Hitlerian antagonists — the Nazis were intent on making Germany great again after the nation’s humiliating and economically crippling defeat in the First World War, the very event that had given rise, within a few months, to the Weimar Republic and a new art school, also in Weimar, where all hierarchies between art and design were to be abolished. Destroying both the republic and the school were among the Nazis’ first tasks.

The Bauhaus, which translates literally as “House of Building,” aimed to make architecture the convener and unifier of all the arts. As a whole, the disciplines embraced industrial production and aimed to create an integrated daily environment where design touched everything, from a teaspoon to a city — as its founding director, Walter Gropius, later put it. The distinction between the fine and the useful arts was to be abolished.

The Bauhaus, which translates literally as “House of Building,” aimed to make architecture the convener and unifier of all the arts. As a whole, the disciplines embraced industrial production and aimed to create an integrated daily environment where design touched everything, from a teaspoon to a city — as its founding director, Walter Gropius, later put it. The distinction between the fine and the useful arts was to be abolished.

The main staircase of the Bauhaus building.CreditAlan John Ainsworth/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

Walter Gropius, circa 1915.CreditFine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

While architecture was not taught at the school for the first half of its existence, even today we speak of “Bauhaus architecture” and feel confident that we know precisely what that means — even though, often, what we call “Bauhaus” has no connection to the school at all. In Israel, the “White City” of Tel Aviv is often described as a legacy of the Bauhaus, though its buildings, which were rarely white at birth, were for the most part designed by people with no link to it.

Around the world, we speak of large-scale public housing as “Bauhaus- inspired,” even if the school’s work resulted in fewer than 1,000 units produced during the institution’s lifetime. Far more consequential models of modern housing came out of programs in Frankfurt and Berlin that had no connection to the Bauhaus, not to mention designers in other countries from the Netherlands to the Soviet Union. At times it seems that the short-lived school has been more successful beyond the grave than it ever was during its heyday — although in that time, the late 1920s, the Bauhaus brought together a wide array of arts and artists, anyone who deployed new industrial materials and celebrated abstract geometric forms.

“Bauhaus” has become, in short, a catchall synonym for modernism in architecture and design. The details of the school’s history — the huge diversity of forms, ideologies, opinion and experiments, not to mention the influence of its three directors — are more the concerns of academic historians than of those who continue to burnish the legend and exploit the selling power of the name “Bauhaus.” No less does it remain a term of derision for neo-traditionalists, who see the modernist Bauhaus as the great destroyer of values enshrined in classical pilasters.

Still, it is important to understand how little ideological coherence the Bauhaus maintained, at least early on. Like any vibrant art school, it attracted avant-garde artists and designers whose experiments had already begun before they arrived at the school. And the direction of the school shifted every few years even as it changed location and directors.

Indeed, the process of inventing an essential “Bauhaus” canon, based on the production of a few central years in a complex history, began almost immediately after the school’s demise. In 1938, five years after the school had been closed and a decade after Gropius turned over the directorship to the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, Gropius organized an exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York in which he attempted to reshape the memory of the Bauhaus in his own image.

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