Architectural Design

1st ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design

Job No: PD0710-67/

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Case study

The design studio

The Bauhaus: preliminary course

This case study describes the teaching at the Bauhaus

school, which was established in Weimar, Germany

in 1919. Its mission was not only to reform art and

architecture education but to change society by doing

so. The school’s radical teachers and innovative teaching

methods were hugely influential. The illustrated exercises

carried out by Bauhaus students have been chosen for

their focus on spatial experimentation with line, colour

and form.

Student work

Students joining the Bauhaus were required to complete

a Preliminary Course (vorkurs) founded by Johannes Itten.

He designed a system to establish the creative potential

of students and provide a thorough basis in visual and

creative theory.

Itten’s approach embraced both intuition and method.

His wish for educational reform and involvement with the

artistic avant-garde led him to encourage students to

analyse and invent rather than to learn by copying, as was

usual in contemporary art schools. Itten was a charismatic

teacher, even persuading several students to follow his

unconventional religious beliefs and modes of dress and

diet. He believed in the emotional and spiritual qualities

of colour and saw colour and form as being inseparable.

Students were to focus on the most basic geometric shapes

and colours to promote their understanding and clear

communication of these qualities. Itten’s student exercises

were designed to explore the contrast between different

colours and shapes in as many ways as possible, both

two- and three-dimensionally.

Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were also influential

teachers on the Preliminary Course. Kandinsky explored

the relationship between the warmth and tone of colour.

He related colour and form to each other and also to the

drawing plane. This demonstrated the spatial effects of

colour and form. Line was considered as a point in motion;

the force used to create it attributing qualities to the line.

Klee considered the artistic process to be mysterious but

that the basic skills needed for expression could be taught.

Bauhaus Preliminary Course, 1930

Suggesting space through the

arrangement of rectangles and letters

by Georg Neidenberger.

Bauhaus Preliminary Course, 1922

The three colours black, white and

red in four proportion patterns:

three-division, arithmetic

progression, geometrical progression

and golden section. Gouache on

paper by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack.

1st ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design

Job No: PD0710-67/

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