Cabinet-making workshop

No workshop has marked the public image of the Bauhaus as much as the cabinet-making workshop. At first it was directed by Johannes Itten, then in 1921, Walter Gropius became master of form and had part of the furnishings for his buildings realized there.

The "Haus am Horn", built for the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, conveys one of the earliest and most radical visions of a "new living" style. At the same time, Gropius, in furnishing his director's office without obeying the dictate of traditional forms of representation, created a modern "Gesamtkunstwerk". For the first time, the exhibition presented furniture visibly built along the basic lines of Gropius' Bauhaus concept, according to which each object should fulfill its practical function, be long-lasting, cheap, good-looking, and also well-suited as a prototype for industrial production. Breuer's lattice chair seemed to fulfill Gropius' instructions to the letter: aesthetically pleasant and possessing an inherent analysis of function, this chair-sculpture became one of the most famous designs from the Bauhaus in Weimar, and was even produced there in small handcrafted series.

In 1925 in Dessau, Breuer, now self-appointed head of the workshop, could realize his radical designs with the help of tubular steel. A series of chairs was created, exploiting the technical potentials of the new material, simplifying the idea of a traditional chair, and providing it with a completely new appearance, underlined by the light-reflecting steel surface. This furniture became the symbol of a new living style and the quintessence of the new orientation of the Bauhaus in Dessau.

When Breuer left in 1928, the aims of the workshop changed under new direction: the production of singular pieces with a design typical of the Bauhaus philosophy was replaced by a profile of furniture based on simple materials and made specifically for industrial production. Hannes Meyer invented the appropriate slogan "popular requirements instead of luxury requirements". Model furnishings proposed by the Bauhaus witness the change: Since the spectrum had been numerically reduced, many of the individual pieces had to be multi-functional. Their design intentionally avoided aesthetic richness and, underscored by the usage of specific materials, repressed any hand-crafted effect.

When Mies van der Rohe became director, the workshop was basically closed down, commissions being rare due to the difficult economic situation. He had developed his famous tubular steel and steel strip furniture long before he became director of the Bauhaus. It is their model function which led them to become Bauhaus furniture: students were convinced that they needed these models in order to reach a compositional entity in their designs comparable to that achieved by Mies in his architecture. The last phase of the Bauhaus was marked by prototypes of inimitable aesthetic quality. The work of Mies' students is unthinkable without these products.

Source From :-www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/werkstaetten