100 Jahre Bauhaus.

A break with traditional ideas and old ways of life, and a new way of thinking in art, architecture, education and society: when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, he established a school of design which still inspires today.

The school was only active for 14 years: as the “State Bauhaus” in Weimar, as a “school of design” in Dessau and as a private education institute in Berlin. It evolved out of the arts and crafts movement and art school reforms.

Its ideas had an impact well beyond the school itself, its locations and its time. It sought to train a new generation of committed designers with all-round skills. Students learnt design basics in their preliminary course. This was followed by training in workshops, where different masters set their personal stamp on the course. 

Teachers were called “masters” and included renowned artists and guest lecturers such as Albers, Bayer, Breuer, Feininger, Kandinsky, Marcks, Klee and Moholy-Nagy to name a few.

This 100 year anniversary is not aimed merely at celebrating magnificent buildings and furniture that defined a style but at engaging with the cultural legacy of its central figures.

To honour this century year, we have designed a limited run of T-Shirts that pay homage in our own celebratory way. 

The ‘Principles’ Tee shows the conceptual diagram showing the structure of teaching at the that was developed by Walter Gropius in 1922, while the chest features a 3M dual lock-up logo of our Footpatrol Gasmask and the iconic shed-roof silhouette of the archives building in Berlin. 

The ’Structures’ Tee plays on the designs of Herbert Bayer. Herbert Bayer was a pioneer of modern typography, graphic design, and advertising. Bayer first studied painting at the school under Wassily Kandinsky before being appointed master of the art school’s printing and advertising workshop in 1925.

He determined the graphic communications style of the Bauhaus by emphasising functionality and clarity in composition, integrating photography and photo-montage and designing and establishing Universal, a lower-case, sans-serif typeface as the standard font for all their publications.

Shop the Bauhaus collection now over at our Footpatrol Webstore.