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Bauhaus design home accessories, toys and furniture

Styles and fashions come and go – but not so the Bauhaus. More than 100 years after Walter Gropius founded the "Staatliches Bauhaus" art school in Weimar, the design principles developed there are shaping our modern lives more than ever, from cubic new buildings to the user interface of a smartphone. A crucial intention of the Bauhaus teachings was to bring together art and utilitarian design in people's everyday lives, and this intention can still be considered successful to the highest degree.

We present here our selection of home accessories, toys and furniture in Bauhaus design. Among them are authorized replicas based on original designs by renowned Bauhaus artists as well as contemporary objects that are unmistakably in the Bauhaus tradition.

The Bauhaus movement was a reaction to the advancing industrialization from the late 19th century. For the first time, machines were able to mass-produce historicist forms with ornate flourishes and ornaments, thereby also devaluing them. Bauhaus designers wanted to reunite art with craftsmanship, but with a completely new formal language that would do justice to the industrial manufacturing process as well as to everyday use. The lack of raw materials as a result of the First World War also had an influence. This resulted in all the artistic prerequisites for the typical Bauhaus style: clear and simple forms, minimalism, meaningfulness and functionality - principles that are still taught today at every design school and applied by the best industrial designers.

The history of the Bauhaus as a teaching institution is short. Walter Gropius, the first director, opened the "Staatliches Bauhaus" in Weimar in 1919 and immediately brought in a number of artists whose names still have a great ring to them today: Gerhard Marcks, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesborg and Josef Albers, to name just a few. After four years, the Thuringian government cut the budget of the Bauhaus by half, whereupon the Bauhaus moved its location to Dessau in 1925. There, legendary Bauhaus furniture such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's first cantilever chairs were created, and the Bauhaus began collaborations with the manufacturing industry. In 1930, Mies van der Rohe took over as director of the Bauhaus. A year later, the Nazi party NSDAP won the municipal elections in Dessau. It closed the Bauhaus the following year, 1932. Bauhaus art, which continues to have a lasting influence on industrial design worldwide, was considered "degenerate" by the Nazis. Mies van der Rohe's attempts to re-establish the Bauhaus in Berlin were stopped by the Nazis. In 1945, the Bauhaus in Dessau was destroyed by the war.

Thus, the Bauhaus was given only 14 short years in which to develop its ideas of a better design world. All the more astonishing is the immense influence that the Bauhaus has had on our cultural history to this day.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau was reconstructed in 1976 and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Other important sites include the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin and the Bauhaus Museum in Tel Aviv.