The Bauhaus, Hans Wingler 1969. This book is titled “The Bauhaus” and was written by Hans Wingler and published by Weimar Dessau in Berlin and Chicago in 1969. It was originally published in German in 1962 under the name “Das Bauhaus” by Verlag Gebr, Rasch & Co. in Cologne, and this English edition was published by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1969 with extensive supplementary material. The spine reads “The Bauhaus, Weimar Dessau, Berlin Chicago, Hans. M. Wingler, The MIT Press” in small black letters and the front and rear boards have “Bauhaus” in large black letters on a white background, with black endpapers, half-titles, a copyright page which says the book was translated by Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert and edited by Joseph Stein, a one-page foreword by Hans Wingler, five pages of Contents, 648 pages of text, then a five-page Index, and the book details the history of the school and has numerous color and black and white plates, including images by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, a long list of students who attended the school from 1919 through 1933, and a twenty-seven page bibliography at the rear. The Bauhaus was a famous school of design. It started as a German art school that combined crafts and the arts and attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and an emphasis on function. It was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius and was grounded in the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk - a comprehensive artwork - and bringing all the arts together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture, and architectural education. The Bauhaus style tends to feature simple geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations. Buildings, furniture, and fonts often feature rounded corners and sometimes rounded walls. Other buildings are characterized by rectangular features, such as protruding balconies with flat, chunky railings facing the street and long banks of windows. Furniture often uses chrome metal pipes that curve at corners, and the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between function and design. An important contributor to the Bauhaus was László Moholy-Nagy (1895 - 1946), a Hungarian painter and photographer who became a professor and leader at the Bauhaus school. He was a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts and was called "relentlessly experimental" because of his pioneering work in painting, drawing, photography, collage, sculpture, film making, theater, and writing. He worked collaboratively with Walter Gropius and others, and his greatest accomplishment was probably starting the School of Design in Chicago, which survives today as part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1923, Moholy-Nagy was invited by Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany; he took over the Bauhaus foundation course and replaced Paul Klee as head of the Metal Workshop, which marked the end of the school's expressionistic leanings and moved it closer towards its original aims as a school of design and industrial integration. After the Third Reich came to power in Germany in 1933, he was no longer allowed to work there because he was Jewish and a foreign citizen, so he moved to the Netherlands, and thanks to his good connections in Amsterdam, he could look forward to better working conditions as an avant-garde artist. One year later Moholy-Nagy emigrated to London, and in 1937, on the recommendation of Walter Gropius, and at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus. Due to financial problems, the school closed briefly in 1938, but Paepcke continued to support the artist, and in 1939 Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design in Chicago. In 1944, the School of Design became the Institute of Design, and in 1949 it would become part of Illinois’s Institute of Technology, the first institution in the United States to offer a PhD in design. In 2016, the Guggenheim Museum in New York exhibited a retrospective of Moholy-Nagy's work, and in 2019, a documentary film, The New Bauhaus, was released, which centered on Moholy-Nagy's life and legacy in Chicago, and besides Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and R. Buckminster Fuller were prominent members of the faculty at the Bauhaus; Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, and futurist best known for his invention of the Dymaxion car and the geodesic dome. The book is hefty and measures 14 1/4 x 10 3/8 in. wide and is in pretty good condition. The binding is tight and the pages and text are clean, with light soiling on the spine, browning on the covers and brown spots along the edges of the pages, corner wrinkles on one page, it has no slipcase, and a small treasure. #216 #1549