Bauhaus 1919-1933
by Magdalena Droste
(Taschen, £40)

SIMULTANEOUS with the cataclysm of WWI exposing the bankruptcy and decadence at the heart of European politics, the 1917 October revolution in Russia emphatically demonstrated that radical political change with a global significance was on the agenda.

In western Europe, little changed politically. But an interrogation of how societies operate continued, with the Bauhaus school and movement in Germany becoming perhaps its most acute cultural manifestation in a climate of ideological ferment.

Architecture, weaving, furniture shops and domestic appliance and graphic design were all within its wide-ranging remit and each had various degrees of commercial success. The Bauhaus band pushed at the musical frontiers while its theatre group sparked spatial innovation with its groundbreaking designs.

This comprehensive approach to learning continues to resonate, as do the many iconic creations of Bauhaus students and historian Magdalena Droste, who worked at the Bauhaus archive, has compiled a stupendous guide marking the Bauhaus century.

It’s a true labour of love, knowledge and understanding that impresses as much for the engaging clarity of its narrative as the breadth of the imagery presented, much of it less well-known.

But Droste’s most significant achievement is in restoring the reputation of Hannes Meyer, who replaced Walter Gropius as Bauhaus director in 1928.

Meyer has for decades been erased, omitted or ignored by most researchers and historians for nefarious ideological reasons. An avowed Marxist and communist sympathiser, his greatest allies at the school were the students themselves, a quarter of whom were members of the KPD, the German Communist Party.

He worked with them on a co-operative basis, often on profitable commercial projects, and his design principles were based on the consideration of needs, not the study of the “nature” of objects that Gropius had advocated.

He put popular necessities before elitist luxuries, a Marxist response to the poverty of wide sectors of society at the time. It’s a kind of design blueprint “for the many, not the few,” recognisable to anyone familiar with the Labour Party’s last election manifesto.

Meyer redirected the social and political focus of Bauhaus by instilling co-operation and standardisation and seeking a harmonious balance between the individual and society. “Architecture is a process of giving form and pattern to the social life of the community,” he once said, “architecture is not an individual act performed by an artist-architect and charged with his emotions. Building is a collective action.”

But the school’s popularity attracted many students who didn’t share its ethos, politics or activism and that spelled the beginning of the end in Germany’s polarised political climate, economic depression and the advent of nazism.

In 1930, Meyer was dismissed by the mayor of Dessau, where the Bauhaus school was based, on the flimsy excuse of having donated to a communist-led striking miners’ fund. Gropius and artist Wassily Kandinsky, who worked at the school, eagerly supported the sacking.

Later, unlike many of his colleagues who left for the US as the nazis rose to power, Meyer emigrated to the Soviet Union and later revolutionary Mexico.

Mies Van der Rohe, who replaced Meyer as director, instigated the purges of communist students and, ironically, in the last couple of months of the Bauhaus’s existence, openly nazi students enrolled. As an institution the Bauhaus was dead and so was its idealism.

Yet Meyer’s ideas had their swan song in 1932 when a seven-strong collective of students — some still communists — drew plans for a housing estate for the workers of the Junkers Factory in Dessau. It was a socio-political project to house 20,000 residents with creches, nursery schools, schools, clubs and a works hospital and green spaces.

To some extent, that project negates the abiding but narrow perception of the Bauhaus’s ground-breaking aesthetics and design innovation as a formal exemplar of modernism.

It is the legacy of Hannes Mayer, with its revolutionary social and political core, that best defines the worth and relevance of the Bauhaus project today.