So this is a diagram of how the school is organized.

Walter Gropius, who was the director, created this kind of donut of a diagram.

And in the very center of it is âbauâ, which means architecture.

So, the idea that architecture encompassed all of the practices,

or was the thing that integrated all of the practices,

is what puts the school firmly

into the realm of being a place where design is given so much focus.

But I want to start my looking at the outer circle, which basically says,

elementary studies in form and then also material studies.

Now, what was that?

If you think about the way that you are taught in maybe

the first year of design or art school, to this day,

in many schools, although not CalArts, you get what's called foundation Year

which is a year where you study basic composition,

you might experiment in different materials that you've never used before,

and you kind of work to think about both the ideas and forms together,

and the way the materials or the way you might work with them are all connected.

That actually was invented at the Bauhaus.

And what it replaced was traditional art education where basically, the way

you learn to be an artist was drawing, drawing, drawing and more drawing.

That was a kind of older style that built your design education through

draftsmanship.

And then, if you wanted to become a specialist in something,

maybe you were apprenticed to a woodworker to learn to be a sculptor in wood.

You work through experience.

Or you might have learnt to craft.

Like you might have learnt how to become a ceramicist.

But the Bauhaus treated all materials as equal things,

and really focused on design

and focused on the place of those different practices in this overall

world of art and design.

So, from that outer level, how you enter into learning,

how to become the artist/designer of the 20th century,

itâs through this kind of beginning of a foundation year and then

you move on to learning or specializing in a material - in this case,

as you go through the circle

some of it is glass, some of it is fabric -

and so there was a bit of everything in the middle.

And as you stayed on as a student, you picked one of those areas where you

were essentially in an apprenticeship relationship with one of

the Bauhaus faculty, who were a specialist in that area.

And then, students came together and

collaborated in some of the architecture projects,

the interiors projects, all kinds of performances and other group activities.

So, although everything I'm saying may sound really familiar to you,

even some high schools have kind of Bauhaus oriented curriculum,

now, to this day, it really gets invented at the Bauhaus and put into plan.

I have many images that I'm about to show you of Bauhaus student projects.

These are projects, so they're not great masterpieces of design but

they show you the kinds of things that people did in that first year.

Like the study of lines and solid forms, and

the composition, which then gets rendered both positive and negatively.

Or this study of the nature of different lines.

I mean, these things are just classroom exercises.

But the notion of learning through a kind of process of handling

different kinds of materials was what was the new idea here.

Or even this really rough color exercise is a way of showing that color

would be isolated, and kind of looked at almost scientifically.

But then you would do it with materials.

And the point wasn't to make a beautifully designed thing, but

to learn the nature of color, and

the nature of the way that one could work with it to apply it at a later phase.

Another really interesting aspect of the early Bauhaus

student work is that you see the kind of creativity of students being set free,

especially in the material studies classes.

So that the process of making things was clearly part of

the premise of the course to learn to be comfortable.

With working with different kinds of material and to think compositionally.

And even that kind of wackiest group projects,

like this picture of an installation of different materials studies projects.

You can even see that it appears that a lot of the work was made out of

things that were scavenged or sort of looks like people

maybe even were picking things out of the garbage to make their student work with.

The early years of the Bauhaus around Weimar,

the economy in Germany was still terrible after World War I.

And a lot of the student projects appeared to have been

made with little or no money, but you see this kind of incredible

creativity around the use of things that are already out there.

And in a way, it fits in with

other experiments that were going on by artists during the period.

For instance, if you look at, Pablo Picasso, you'll see him taking newspaper,

cuttings of headlines and putting them into paintings.

Dada of artists were using found materials.

And at the Bauhaus, that kind of idea, that avant garde idea of

accepting the world as it is and working with it becomes part of literally,

of the curriculum through these kinds of studies

that are based on the use of really simple, almost found materials.

Some things are more clearly organized like this plaster relief,

which is another compositional study that by painting it all white,

has made the form come out clearly as the thing that is being looked at.

But then on the other hand, a project like this one where a student scavenged pieces

of metal and makes a sort of sculptural composition against a piece of wood

clearly highlights the different natures of those two

radically different materials and says something about developing an eye

on how to get an idea out of the design of the actual material itself.

The Foundation Year

Ideas from the History of Graphic Design

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