The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by an architect named Walter Gropius. Gropius came from the Werkbund movement, which sought to integrate art and economics and to add an element of engineering to art. The Werkbund movement failed to achieve this integration, but the foundation of the Bauhaus saw the solution that had previously been overlooked. The Bauhaus was founded by the combination of the Weimar Art Academy and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. The students of this new school were trained by both an artist and a master craftsman, fulfilling Gropius' desire to make "modern artists familiar with science and economics, [who] began to unite the creative imagination with a practical knowledge of craftsmanship, and thus to develop a new sense of functional design." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The school had three goals at the beginning that remained essentially the same throughout the life of the Bauhaus, even as the direction of the school changed significantly and repeatedly. The school's first aim was to "rescue all the arts from the isolation in which each then found itself", to encourage individual craftsmen and craftsmen to work cooperatively and combine all their skills. Secondly, the school aimed to raise the status of handicrafts, chairs, lamps, teapots, etc., to the same level enjoyed by fine arts, painting, sculpture, etc. The third objective was to maintain contacts with industry and craft leaders in an attempt to eventually gain independence from government support by selling projects to industry. With this foundation the Bauhaus began and influenced our lives immensely in ways that most people probably take for granted. As the school sought to combine art with engineering and craftsmanship, innovation swept through the Bauhaus resulting in a multitude of advances that affected the most basic aspects of life. "Everyone who sits in a tubular steel chair, uses an adjustable reading lamp, or lives in a house built partially or entirely from prefabricated elements benefits from a revolution in design largely brought about by the Bauhaus;"( Whitford p.10 ) rising from this chair and looking at the lamp on my desk, and the drywall in front of me, I feel a new respect for the work of the Bauhaus. The practical innovations developed by the Bauhaus have had a profound impact on designs enjoyed by the industry, as evidenced by the desks and chairs that fill offices, lobbies, and lounges across America, not to mention the portable classrooms that seem to be favored today, delivered by truck, propped up and bolted together and filled with those ubiquitous tubular steel and plastic chairs. The effects of the Bauhaus extend beyond our furniture and lamps, into the realms of architecture, theater and typography. where we still talk about the designs and style of the Bauhaus today. Typography The work of other sectors of the Bauhaus to achieve a level of clarity in design and production that had often not been achieved also directly influenced their views on typography. The Bauhaus favored the use of sans serif typefaces, which was strongly disapproved of by most of Germany, who preferred a heavier and more complicated Gothic typeface. This older-looking, more formal-looking font had been used traditionally in the German press, but it was difficult to read, a feature that some Bauhaus teachers disliked. This led a teacher, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, to create a drawing oftypeface and a theory of typefaces and formatting which was published in the book Bauhaus Staatlicles Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923, a book on Bauhaus typesetting and typography. Below is a look at Moholy's opinions expressed in the book: Typography is a communication tool. It must communicate clearly in the most urgent form. Clarity must be emphasized because, compared to prehistoric pictograms, it is the essence of script. Our intellectual attitude towards the world is individually precise (this individual precision is today transforming into collective precision), as opposed to the old amorphous forms individually and then collectively. So above all unambiguous clarity throughout the typography. The communication of readability must never suffer from an aesthetic code adopted a priori. It was this thinking that inspired the simpler, less formal and imposing characters of the Bauhaus, and those characters that irritated much of Germany. However, the German public responded even less favorably to the ideas of Herbert Bayer, a student and later teacher of the Bauhaus who held even more radical views on typography, none of which were viewed favorably by much of Germany, although some of his ideas have a lot of sense. Bayer did not like the use of serifs, the small lines that extend from the letters, as in the Times font, or Times New Roman, he found them useless and wasteful, Germany at the time preferred serifs and more complicated Gothic fonts, Bayer used these sans serif fonts in his work for the Bauhaus and for his external commissions, but the Bauhaus using this typeface was not new, or supported exclusively by Bayer, but some of his other ideas caused more problems: Why should we write and print in two alphabets? Both a large and small mark are not necessary to identify a single sound. We don't speak with a capital A and a lowercase A. a single alphabet gives practically the same result as mixing uppercase and lowercase, and at the same time weighs less on all those who write. He argued that once everyone got used to using all the individual cases, things would be easier; typing would be easier to master and faster to perform since there would be no need to use the Shift key, this way typewriters would be easier and cheaper to produce since only one case would be needed. He also discussed the possibility that commercial printing would also be cheaper since printers would only have to worry about a single format and that things would take up less space saving paper and money, and in 1925 the Bauhaus stopped using capital letters in their prints. On some levels these arguments make sense, and if people could start learning to read/write without capitalization things would eventually be simplified, but the amount of change this would require is enormous, just trying to break people's habits for him to have already learned to write would have required an enormous amount of time and energy and would have met with strong opposition from almost everyone. I described what would happen in the United States if someone tried to convert the masses to this new way of writing, in Germany things would be worse. The German public and German officials disliked the Bauhaus's use of sans serif fonts, seeing it as another break with tradition by a group that was already too far gone for their tastes. Their irritation at this was overcome by their indignation at the Bauhaus's decision to stop using capital letters. If you look at this departure from the perspective of the English language, it doesn't seem like it.