You Can Now Browse Harvard's Huge Bauhaus Collection Online
Liz Stinson
The school recently made more than 32,000 digitized artifacts---paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures, and more---available for browsing
The Bauhaus never really died. Though the famed German art school existed in physical form for just 14 years, its legacy lives on in many ways. The latest incarnation: Harvard's massive online archive. The school recently made more than 32,000 digitized artifacts—paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures, and more—available for browsing, and it's a beautiful time-suck for design lovers.
Architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 with the goal of creating a utopian school where the disciplines of art and design could overlap and dissolve into a unified artistic language. The school ran workshops on everything from architecture to weaving to graphic design, but its most famous exports, by far, were the people who studied there.
Bauhaus alumni were a prolific and influential bunch. Even after the school shuttered in 1933 due to pressure from the Nazi regime, the artists and designers who studied there continued to spread the school's teachings. Mies van der Rohe, the architect and final director of the Bauhaus, immigrated to Chicago to become director of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology. Designer Josef Albers departed for Black Mountain College in North Carolina before heading to teach at Yale. Gropius landed at Harvard, where he chaired the Graduate School of Design from 1937 to 1952. And thus began Harvard's deep ties to the Bauhaus.
Over the years, Bauhaus masters and lesser-known students have donated their work to Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum, giving rise to one of the largest collections of Bauhaus ephemera in the world. Harvard has done an excellent job in making what could be a paralyzing amount of information accessible. The archive is organized by medium and showcases the student work of famed designers. The items are searchable by keyword, title, artist, or object number.
Though the archive helps to contextualize the massive amount of work produced by Bauhaus designers, it frankly doesn't have much work to do. The Bauhaus' legacy is already-well established through its long lineage of influential designers— now it's just easier to find their work.
Liz writes about where design, technology, and science intersect.