The Bauhaus: Basic Course

All students of digital design and production—whether learning in a classroom or on their own—need to understand the basic principles of design. These principles are often excluded from books that teach software. Foundations of Digital Art and Design reinvigorates software training by integrating design exercises into tutorials fusing design fundamentals and core Adobe Creative Cloud skills. The result is a comprehensive design learning experience.


This book is organized into six sections that focus on vector art, photography, image manipulation, typography, web design, and effective habits. Design topics and principles include: Bits, Dots, Lines, Shapes, Rule of Thirds, Zone System, Color Models, Collage, Appropriation, Gestalt, The Bauhaus Basic Course Approach, The Grid, Remix, Automation, and Revision.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was one of the most dynamic artists of the Bauhaus; a painter, printmaker, avant-garde bookbinder, designer of costumes, jewelry, interiors, and building exteriors, she was the first female architect to sign off on architectural plans for a flat-roofed building in 1922. During the interwar period, she taught children extensively, and it was this aspect of her work that became her calling in Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp in 1943. This essay examines Dicker-Brandeis's too-little-known work from the Bauhaus and beyond as well as her amazing story, and it traces the surprising healing power embedded in aspects of the Bauhaus movement and embodied in Dicker-Brandeis. Lastly, the essay explores how Dicker-Brandeis's work lived on through her students after her own death, so that she became one of the foundational teachers of the post-war art therapy movement.

The impact of the Bauhaus teaching methods reached far beyond Germany. Conversely, throughout its existence, a Japanese sensibility permeated the Bauhaus, springing from the Japonisme of individual professors, until its closure in 1933. This article analyzes the reciprocal impact of German and Japanese design education in the interbellum period in order to shed new light on the tightly knit network of associations then connecting Japan and Europe.

In 1934 Alexey Brodovitch, an exiled White-Russian aristocrat with no formal art training, was invited by Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, to become the magazine’s chief designer.  Given carte blanche by Snow to reinvent the magazine Brodovitch introduced elements of Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism, Bauhaus design, the art of airbrush, and the integration of typography with photography and the page. While he did not invent the use of the double page spread, he did introduce the concept that each double page spread of a magazine was a canvas waiting to be realized and that each edition of a magazine was a complete and collaborative work of art. A teacher and mentor that did not believe art could be taught in school, Alexey Brodovitch shaped and formed an entire generation of the most influential photographers and designers in America and was among those responsible for introducing European Modernist ideas and concepts into American design.

Βιογραφικά και καλλιτεχνικά στοιχεία για τον Lazlo Moholy Nagy. Στα πλαίσια του μαθήματος Μορφολογία: Η διαδοχή των στυλ από την αρχιτεκτονική στο έπιπλο. Υπεύθυνη καθηγήτρια Δημητρολοπούλου Ασημίνα. Πανεπιστήμια Πελοποννήσου, Τμήμα θεατρικών σπουδών.
Έτος σύνταξης 2017.

This book explores the intimate relationship between Mazdaznan, Johannes Itten and the Vorkurs (Preliminary or Foundation Course) at the Bauhaus, Weimar. It is a practical guide to performing the exercises that Itten taught at the Bauhaus and a celebration of a moment of mysticism at the heart of Modernism.

"At the start of the morning I brought my classes to mental and physical readiness for intensive work through relaxing, breathing, and concentrating exercises. The training of the body as an instrument of the mind is of the greatest importance for creative man."
Johannes Itten

Founded by the extraordinary Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish in Chicago at the start of the 20th century Mazdaznan was a religion and way of life. Dr. Ha'nish is claimed to have been variously a genius, a shepherd, a typesetter, a magician and a fraud, as well as friend and inspiration to a bewildering variety of figures including Karl Marx, Haeckel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, H.G. Wells, Annie Besant and J. H. Kellogg. It is said that Edison named the first lightbulb Mazda in his honour and that Henry Ford attributed the dawn of the motor-age to Ha'nish's influence.

Mazdaznan's vegetarian diet, magnetic and electric sexual exchanges, breathing exercises and glandular theories were taken to Europe by its early disciples, flourishing in Switzerland, Germany and England between the wars.

The Swiss artist and teacher Johannes Itten was a devout Mazdaznan and its exercises were an essential part of his courses at the Bauhaus.

Health & Breath Culture has been newly illustrated by Ian Whittlesea with drawings of current Foundation students demonstrating the exercises. It is followed by a selection of found texts and images that go some way to explaining the beliefs and history of Mazdaznan.

El 20 de marzo de 1919, el arquitecto alemán Walter Gropius (1883-1969), junto a un pequeño grupo de jóvenes profesores, artistas, intelectuales y estudiantes, fundaban en la ciudad de Weimar, la Staatliche Bauhaus: una nueva y revolucionaria escuela que marcaría un punto de inflexión en la historia del diseño.

El nombre Bauhaus, era el resultado de la unión de los vocablos alemanes Bau, construcción, y Haus, casa; casa de construcción, en alusión a las ‘Bauhütter’ medievales (gremios de constructores de iglesias): un anhelo de Walter Gropius, por resucitar su espíritu comunitario.

Retrospectivamente, la Bauhaus es una consecuencia directa de su época: un período fuertemente marcado por la inestabilidad política, el desempleo, la inflación, una devaluación de la moneda, y un descontento generalizado que había producido en los jóvenes alemanes, el deseo de una revolución cultural.

Se trataba de una nueva generación, que rechazaba el arte del pasado nacionalista, y abogaba por un futuro esperanzador. Bajo un espíritu utópico, la idea de Gropius era la de hacer surgir ese hombre nuevo, que llevará la esperanza del cambio y la renovación: “…una criatura dotada en todos los sentidos y formada por los mejores artistas y arquitectos de la época, que pudiese crear el presente y el futuro de un siglo moderno”[2].

Un prototipo que ha pervivido en el tiempo, evolucionando, mutando; y que, con la incursión de los sistemas digitales y de las tecnologías de prefabricación a finales del siglo XX, quedaría conformado en los modelos MediaLab: centros de innovación y desarrollo, exentos de una matriz académica convencional, que incorpora la tecnología digital en la enseñanza como un instrumento flexible para la adquisición de nuevos saberes, a través de procesos creativos, abiertos, colaborativos e interdisciplinares.

En este contexto, este artículo hace foco en esos procesos, e indaga las conexiones entre la pedagogía Bauhaus, y los modelos Medialab: un laboratorio de enseñanza, de investigación y de práctica, que incorpora lo digital, buscando reformular la currícula del diseño, modificando el rol de los docentes, transformados en tutores del proceso de aprendizaje, permitiendo de este modo, repensar los caminos y los contenidos que se imparten.

A 100 años del nacimiento de la Bauhaus, se hace necesaria una revisión crítica de su impacto y evolución dentro del diseño. Una búsqueda de sus esencias, pervivencias, y elementos trascendentales, que se han convertido en patrones de inspiración para las escuelas de diseño de los años venideros.

While Josef Albers is a well-recognised figure in twentieth century art, his photographic work remains an understudied aspect of his achievements. This dissertation focuses on seventy photocollages that Albers produced at the Bauhaus in the early 1930s. It offers a new understanding of these works by arguing that Albers’s artistic and life philosophies — most often exposed in his teaching and talks — provide a meaningful lens through which to view them. This dissertation posits that an understanding of the artist’s beliefs, along with a close look at the context in which he produced this body of work, not only sheds light on the photocollages’ thematic material, but also serves to illuminate the artist’s relation to photography. The first chapter demonstrates that an analysis of the underlying principles of Albers’s pedagogical exercises and his commitment to the founding ideal of the Bauhaus can illuminate how the photocollages manifest and substantiate these convictions. The second chapter offers an examination of Albers’s perceptive and cognitive theories and argues that, placed within the context of photographic “objectivity” in Weimar Germany, they provide a revealing frame of reference to understand Albers’s ambivalent relation to the photographic medium. Consequently, this chapter exposes the ways in which the works express photographic doubt, and through a close analysis of their seriality and incompleteness, demonstrates how they provide an alternative to common habits of photographic seeing and knowing.

Ostensibly a monograph on the drawings of Josef Albers, the reader will find under the heading ‘excursus’ a series of investigations into the concept of constellation in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the semiotics of star maps, the rhetorics of geometry and the structure of representation in which Josef Albers’s Structural Constellations are not discussed directly for almost 200 pages. Although it departs from its subject matter, this group of essays may be regarded as tending towards an interpretation of Structural Constellations, as Benjamin would say, ‘returning in a roundabout way to its original object.’
The main themes of the dissertation are addressed to specific objects: texts by Benjamin and Adorno, star maps in the tradition which stretches between Ptolemy’s Almagest and Argelander’s Bonner Durchmustering, geometry lessons, the gossip about Cubism, works and manifestos by Alberti, Dürer, van Doesburg, Lissitsky and Albers. The aim is to broaden the terms of reference and develop more precise interpretative tools for an assessment of Albers’s Structural Constellations, to place these works in a more accurate historical context and provide the basis for a reassessment of some of the products and rhetorics of twentieth century modernism.
The reader should not expect the dissertation to reach a climax with Albers’s Structural Constellations. Albers emerges, even as he dissppears in the elucidation of his works, as a late modernist and practitioner of negative dialectics. His works emerge as a configuration of these dialectics and offer a reflection on the topics and ideas explored in the dissertation.
The historical and theoretical discussion of the metaphorical and graphic praxis of constellation and what I have called the ‘epistemological wish-images’ mediated by geometry is counterbalanced by a companion volume cataloguing some 1,500 drawings by Josef Albers.

The first year in architectural design education as the unique and basic experience of education make an effort to define and convey that knowledge that covers a certain mode of perceiving, conceptualizing and expressing the visual/physical world. This experience is enriched by the skills to reproduce and manipulate it, according to a design ideology and architectural discourse. Its content, the abstract and conceptual code system of the Basic Design, aims to put forth a universal design culture. Because of its denial of the social and cultural context and the a(nti)historical attitude, the Beginning Design Education consequently Basic Design Pedagogy became a corner stone in the history of the modern architectural education.

Tom Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, had it backwards: The Bauhaus, rather than being alien to the United States as Wolfe suggests, was originally home grown. The Bauhaus, established by architect Walter Gropius to promote a powerful fusion of art, technology, and craft, has renewed relevance now, when people are looking at ways in which education can stimulate creativity and innovation through learning that is more “hands on.” The Bauhaus (German for “build house”) was a “makerspace” par excellence. Far more often, architects shape the spaces in which learning occurs rather than the learning curriculum itself. Yet architects, since they straddle the fields of art and technology, have unique insight into the kinds of creative curricula now sought for STEM, and even more especially STEAM education. An overview of the Bauhaus highlights this.

The influence of the German Bauhaus‘s Vorkurs (preliminary course) on schools of architecture and design in the 20th century has become so fa- miliar that many come to think of it as a point of mythic origin. Yet, despite its renown, the application for many of the Vorkurs exercises in the educa- tion of architects remains unclear. Originally conceived by Walter Gropius as an alternative to a normative Beaux Arts study of exemplars in antiquity, the Bauhaus promoted the education of artists and architects through ex- ercises that explored the compositional possibilities of different material effect and affects. After the departure of Vorkurs director Johannes Itten in 1922, the appointment of the Hungarian artist, László Moholy–Nagy as his replacement was predicated on Gropius’ reorientation of the Bauhaus towards “Art and Technology – a New Unity” during its 1923 Bauhaus Ausstellung (Bauhaus Exhibition). Inspired by the Austrian born botanist and nature philosopher Raoul Francé‘s concept of ‘bio–technique,’ Moho- ly–Nagy intended that students would extend a study of materials in the Vorkurs exercises to the creative imagination of “technische Form” (tech- nical form) in different media. To demonstrate this new approach to de- sign education in practice, Moholy-Nagy published two books, Von Mate- rial zur Architektur in 1929 (The New Vision in 1932) and Vision in Motion in 1947. Despite these examples, it remains unclear what role the Vorkurs material studies were intended to play in the imagination of architecture in particular. This paper explores the historical and theoretical implications of Moholy–Nagy‘s pedagogical approach towards design education in the creative translation of the Bauhaus’ Vorkurs material studies to new art and technological solutions for architecture.

Presentación encuentro académico Area de Diseño Ministerio de Cultura Chile - Dirac con Universidad Bauhaus Weimar - Fundación Bauhaus Dessau, octubre 2019. páginas 86-111, y 164-166, link del libro: https://issuu.com/centroculturallamonda/docs/catalogo_issue_bauhaus_1120_web

From a special issue of The Brooklyn Rail on “Art and Protest,” this short essay focuses on a pair of album pages in which Yugoslavian Bauhaus member Ivana Tomljenović symbolically electrifies and explodes the Dessau Bauhaus building as an act of protest on behalf of a communist movement that the school could not tame. Artist, fashion plate, sports star, revolutionary, and spy, Tomljenović's life in the 1920s and '30s reads like a novel. This picture, which was created around 1930 and then pieced into an album in 1980, reflects moments of both revolutionary zeal and late-Balkan nostalgia in a Europe of shifting allegiances and boundaries. Available online: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/06/criticspage/good-luck-bauhaus-and-berlin-comrades-and-see-you-after-the-revolution

Josef Albers remained at Black Mountain College for less than a year after Robert Rauschenberg had enrolled in the fall of 1948. Despite this short overlap in time, Albers’ influence upon his student is well acknowledged, perhaps most adamantly by Rauschenberg himself, who considered Albers his “most important teacher.” Many accounts of their relationship highlight its significance to Rauschenberg's monochromes and Combines during the 1950s. However, little has been said of Albers’ impact on the blueprint series (1949–51), the first works to win recognition for Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, his partner and peer. The young couple began making the life-size cyanotype photograms the summer after studying with Albers, solidifying the Bauhaus-infused arts education that eventually led Rauschenberg to his famed Combines and later silkscreen works. This chapter demonstrates how the blueprints exemplify Albers’ lauded instructional methods, especially in visual perception, formal composition, and material analysis, all of which stem from the Bauhaus’ artistic and pedagogical practices. Shining new light on the blueprints to illuminate their embodiment of Bauhaus principles strengthens the connection between the work of Albers and Rauschenberg, and, as a result, positions the Bauhaus as a crucial determinant of Rauschenberg's neo-avant-garde practice.

Nowadays, is necessary to make a critical revision of the traditional methods in architectural learning. Visual language methods of abstracts forms arrive to us without fundamental essence. The traditional methods reveal basic elements by them self. The initial avant-guard literature allow us to architectural understanding through observer reaction. The aim of article is to establish links between traditional methods and the methods drift of esperience of formal aesthetic. The “Toro Muerto” desert with many petroglyph is an ideal place to form architectural speeches as a displacement result. Desde una revisión crítica a la vigencia de los métodos tradicionales de enseñanza de la arquitectura, deducimos que los que hacían referencia al lenguaje visual de las formas abstractas habían llegado a nosotros desprovistos de su esencia fundacional y se sustentaban únicamente en su virtud para revelar la sintaxis de sus elementos básicos. El retorno a literatura germinal vanguardista nos corr...

Nowadays, is necessary to make a critical revision of the traditional methods in architectural learning. Visual language methods of abstracts forms arrive to us without fundamental essence. The traditional methods reveal basic elements by them self. The initial avant-guard literature allow us to architectural understanding through observer reaction. The aim of article is to establish links between traditional methods and the methods drift of esperience of formal aesthetic. The “Toro Muerto” desert with many petroglyph is an ideal place to form architectural speeches as a displacement result.

Desde una revisión crítica a la vigencia de los métodos tradicionales de enseñanza de la arquitectura, deducimos que los que hacían referencia al lenguaje visual de las formas abstractas habían llegado a nosotros desprovistos de su esencia fundacional y se sustentaban únicamente en su virtud para revelar la sintaxis de sus elementos básicos. El retorno a literatura germinal vanguardista nos corroboró que estos métodos nos ofertaba también el derrotero para entender  la arquitectura a partir de los fenómenos que se suscitaban con el observador. Ello nos pareció sumamente estimulante para establecer vínculos entre estos métodos y los que se derivan de la concepción fenomenológica que reconoce a la experiencia como generativa de una estética formal. El desierto de “Toro muerto” en Arequipa plagado de una ingente cantidad de petroglifos, sirvió como un lienzo de posibilidades para que, a través de plataformas que enhebraban una narrativa, la arquitectura acontezca como una consecuencia del desplazamiento.

The chapter follows the thread of design education and tactile pedagogies, focusing on a significant shift in the 1950s and 1960s by which the senses started to be treated as commodities, technologies, and infrastructures. These new models of sense turned sensual operations and feelings into data that had to be brought into information flows and produce feedback loops to improve teaching and research; it also made classrooms into research laboratories and workshops where new ways of being in the world and languages to talk about experience were configured. Throughout the chapter, my argument is that design education contributed in significant ways to define a new sensorium that was to be central to educational research and to social and psychological sciences, in which tactile and visual experiences were translated as information records and as data processing. 
I first present some ideas about tactility as a pedagogical strategy in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in the Bauhaus school. In the second section, I introduce the shifts that the “Americanization” of tactilism in the 1940s and 1950s. In the third section, I discuss both Konrad Wachsmann’s algorithmic pedagogy and Bruno Munari’s tactile workshops in the 1950s-1970s. Both experiences, despite their differences, shared some assumptions about knowledge and the self that were related to the new sensorium  and new kind of governmentality. In the concluding remarks, I reflect on what the history of design education as a seemingly marginal field might say about educational research and its silences and blind spots.

En pocas ocasiones se ha impartido en una escuela de arte unas teorías tan originales y completas como las que impartió la música Gertrud Grunow (1870-1944) en su asignatura de Teoría de la Armonía para la célebre Bauhaus alemana, entre 1919 y 1923. Había estudiado con maestros como Hans Guido von Bülow (1830- 1894), Scharwenka (1850-1924) o Giovanni Battista Lamperti (1839-1910) y llegó a la escuela siendo una autora de un reconocido prestigio intelectual. El objetivo de su asignatura en la Bauhaus era la búsqueda de un equilibrio y el análisis por parte del alumnado de sus propias habilidades artísticas a través de la música. Basándose en fenómenos como la sinestesia, consideraba que a cada color le correspondía no sólo una nota musical sino que también estaba en relación con un sentimiento, movimiento, material y estado del alma humana.

En pocas ocasiones se ha impartido en una escuela de arte unas teorías tan originales y completas como las que impartió la música Gertrud Grunow (1870-1944) en su asignatura de Teoría de la Armonía para la célebre Bauhaus alemana, entre 1919 y 1923. Había estudiado con maestros como Hans Guido von Bülow (1830- 1894), Scharwenka (1850-1924) o Giovanni Battista Lamperti (1839-1910) y llegó a la escuela siendo una autora de un reconocido prestigio intelectual. El objetivo de su asignatura en la Bauhaus era la búsqueda de un equilibrio y el análisis por parte del alumnado de sus propias habilidades artísticas a través de la música. Basándose en fenómenos como la sinestesia, consideraba que a cada color le correspondía no sólo una nota musical sino que también estaba en relación con un sentimiento, movimiento, material y estado del alma humana.

Nowadays, is necessary to make a critical revision of the traditional methods in architectural learning. Visual language methods of abstracts forms arrive to us without fundamental essence. The traditional methods reveal basic elements by them self. The initial avant-guard literature allow us to architectural understanding through observer reaction. The aim of article is to establish links between traditional methods and the methods drift of esperience of formal aesthetic. The "Toro Muerto" desert with many petroglyph is an ideal place to form architectural speeches as a displacement result.