History of design education: Design education as it stands today has been greatly influenced by the Bauhaus (bauhaus meaning "house for building"). Most consider it to be the first formal design school. The origins of the Bauhaus obviously trace back to Kindergarten (literally, the garden of children), the school system of educating young children perfected by Friedrich Froebel (1782-1851). "Masters Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, and Paul Klee infused the school's revolutionary Vorkurs or basic course, a required class of abstract-design activities, with an emphasis that owed a substantial debt to Froebel's Kindergarten system." (Norman Brosterman. Inventing Kindergarten. p.120). As Norman Brosterman's Inventing Kindergarten book illustrates, the series of "gifts" used by children in kindergarten are very much what young designers were taught to experiment and to "play" with as they are learning about formal principles and relationships. The gifts stimulated imagination and creativity while teaching the designers to think about formal principles in 2D and in three dimensions. In 1919 Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was appointed to head of the Bauhaus in Weimar, the German capital. Gropius came from the Werkbund movement which sought to integrate art and economics, and to add an element of engineering to art. Students at this new school were trained by both an artist and a master craftsman, realizing the desires of Gropius to make "modern artists familiar with science and economics, [that] began to unite creative imagination with a practical knowledge of craftsmanship, and thus to develop a new sense of functional design." (H. Bayer, Bauhaus 1919-1928 p. 13). The first aim of the school was to "rescue all of the arts from the isolation in which each then found itself," (Whitford, Bauhaus p.11) to encourage the individual artisans and craftsmen to work cooperatively and combine all of their skills. Secondly, the school set out to elevate the status of crafts to the same level enjoyed by fine arts (i.e., painting, sculpting, etc.). Thirdly, to maintain contact with the leaders of industry and craft in an attempt to eventually gain independence from government support by selling designs to industry. In 1937, in the wake of the Nazis' rise to power, the stars of the Bauhaus fled to the United States, where they were welcomed with open arms. Gropius was made head of the school of architecture at Harvard. Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus, which evolved into the Chicago Institute of Design (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), and Mies van der Rohe, who had become the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago. The effects of the Bauhaus stretch beyond product design, into the realms of architecture, theater, and typography, where the designs and style of the Bauhaus are still very much part of today's design education scenes.

---

Martin Teasdale mteasdal@pratt.edu Last Update : 27JAN98 Copyright © CORE77 Inc.