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The Bauhaus, founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, taught art, craft and industrial design in one school. In just 14 years it shaped modern furniture, typography and architecture with simple, useful forms suited to factory production.

Weimar, 1919

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The story behind the card

Bauhaus means “building house” in German. Students began with a preliminary course on materials, shapes and colour, then trained in workshops for metal, weaving, furniture, printing and more, with the aim of designing objects that could be mass-produced. Teachers included the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, the weaver Gunta Stölzl and the artist László Moholy-Nagy. The school moved to Dessau in 1925, into a glass-fronted building designed by Gropius, and to Berlin in 1932. The Nazis attacked it as un-German and communist, and in 1933 it closed under their pressure. Many of its teachers emigrated: Gropius taught at Harvard, the last director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, went to Chicago, and Bauhaus-trained architects helped build the White City of Tel Aviv.

Türkçe oku
Bauhaus, mimar Walter Gropius'un 1919'da Almanya'nın Weimar kentinde kurduğu, sanatı, zanaatı ve endüstriyel tasarımı bir arada öğreten bir okuldu. Yalnızca 14 yıl açık kaldı, ama fabrikada üretilebilecek sade ve kullanışlı biçimleriyle modern mobilyayı, yazı tasarımını ve mimariyi derinden etkiledi.
Weimar, 1919

Bauhaus, Almancada “yapı evi” demektir. Öğrenciler önce malzeme, biçim ve renk üzerine bir hazırlık kursundan geçer, sonra metal, dokuma, mobilya ve baskı gibi atölyelerde çalışırdı; amaç, seri üretilebilecek nesneler tasarlamaktı. Öğretmenleri arasında ressamlar Paul Klee ve Wassily Kandinsky, dokuma sanatçısı Gunta Stölzl ve sanatçı László Moholy-Nagy vardı. Okul 1925'te Dessau'ya, Gropius'un tasarladığı cam cepheli binaya, 1932'de de Berlin'e taşındı. Naziler okulu “Alman ruhuna aykırı” ve komünist diye suçladı; okul 1933'te bu baskı altında kapandı. Öğretmenlerinin çoğu göç etti: Gropius Harvard'da ders verdi, son müdür Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Chicago'ya gitti, Bauhaus'ta yetişmiş mimarlar da Tel Aviv'in Beyaz Şehir diye anılan bölümünün yapımında rol oynadı.

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Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

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The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

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Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

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