Bauhaus Designs & Mies van der Rohe Design

Physical setting is important in any educational undertaking, but it assumes special significance in the case of studies that require space, equipment, storage areas, special lighting, and the many other necessities of studying and making art. The literature on the relationship between successful learning and setting confirms this assertion. It will be briefly reviewed with an emphasis on emerging needs (such as increasing reliance on technology) and this will be followed by a discussion of the manner in which art schools of the past have managed the problem of providing optimum spaces in which students and teachers can pursue their work. The study of these institutions indicates that schools of art and design are most successful when they have a coherent purpose and the elements of the setting can be designed specifically to meet its programmatic needs.

The first example is the Bauhaus, at Dessau, Germany, the school founded by architect Walter Gropius and others that was intended to help fill the need for designers of various kinds in industry and the arts. Gropius and his associates held, as their manifesto stated, that artists of all kinds need general skills--including a sound education in design principles--and that training in the various crafts should include the entire process from start to finish. The Bauhaus, therefore, had two types of specialized learning spaces: classrooms for design and workshops for crafts, as well as studios for pa

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ll of the room, taking up no well-lit space and providing room to hang drawings. The Trade School contained library, classrooms, and instructors' rooms and the studio tower was the location of the students' rooms (28) and other facilities. The school was quite self-contained and this was intended to help create a community in which ideas were shared. Interestingly, although Gropius held the idea that there had to be equality among all the design pursuits the majority of what are thought of as 'trades' were carried out in the well-lit but short-of-windows basement and first floor of the workshop building. One trade that received plenty of natural light, however, was wall-painting and another was architecture. It is not difficult to guess that, despite his egalitarian ideals, Gropius was building a certain level of class privilege into the school. After all, the trades would benefit every bit as much from natural light as the finer arts do but in the Bauhaus scheme the hierarchy of the arts still asserted itself in small ways. Because he was given a great deal of glass the cash-strapped architect had to incorporate it into the building. Curtis notes that "the glazing far transcended its merely formal or functional character

Category: Arts - B