An avant-garde German school for the arts, design and architecture, the Bauhaus proved enormously influential despite its brief existence. Launched in Wiemar in 1919, the school relocated to Dessau in 1925, where its founding director, Walter Gropius, designed its famous school building as an exemplar of modern, functionalist design. The school moved again in 1930 to Berlin, where it faced mounting opposition from the Nazi Party, which viewed the school’s untraditional practices as dangerous, misguided and unpatriotic. In 1933 its third and final director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in agreement with his staff, reluctantly opted to close the school before being forced to do so by the authorities. In the ensuing years former faculty members of the Bauhaus scattered internationally, especially to the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, bringing aspects of the Bauhaus curriculum into popular practice.
Below is the inaugural episode of the long-running, public-television program, Architectures, produced by Arte France, which focuses on the Dessau Bauhaus.
