Elle Decoration

Elle Decoration

At the beginning of the last century, the German art and design school BAUHAUS was a laboratory of innovation and home to fascinating creative personalities. The Bauhaus is an unrivalled well of inspiration that casts a long shadow over everything that today's artists come up with. And this year, it is celebrating its 100th anniversary! If you tell a taxi driver in Berlin that you want a ride to the Bauhaus, there's a one-in-two chance he'll drop you off at the gates of the gigantic DIY shop. The mistake is understandable, as the name Bauhaus was adopted by many in the 20th century. It's the name of a furniture store in Hong Kong, a solar energy conference in Frankfurt, an investment bank in Madrid, a hostel in Bruges, Belgium, and even a defunct British post-punk band. Design enthusiasts, however, have only one definition for Bauhaus in their dictionary - it is a school of art, design and architecture founded in 1919 in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius. The ideas and works that emerged in this progressive bastion of form experimentation were so unprecedented, strange and beautiful that the teaching approach here began to be copied in schools around the world. The most prominent figures of Modernism taught and studied here: the architect Mies van der Rohe, the painters Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Vasily Kandinsky, the product designers Marcel Breuer and Marianne Brandt, the graphic designer and typographer Herbert Bayer, and the photographer László Moholy-Nagy. No wonder so many companies like the idea of having the same name. The name Bauhaus was coined by Walter Gropius as a compound of the German words "bauen" (to build) and "haus" (house) - he imagined that the collective efforts of all students and teachers would create an imaginary utopian building that would accommodate all artistic disciplines.