Aalto studied the Bauhaus school initially through publications and experiences
recounted by his friends. The objective of the school was to bridge the gap between
different disciplines of visual arts and industrial production methods. Established in
1919, the slogan of the school was initially “art and craft”, changed in 1922 into “art into
industry”. Bauhaus wanted to develop housing in a way appropriate to the times, its
scale ranging from simple household items to a complete house. The school adopted the
method of systematic experiments on form, technology and economics. Architecture
gained an increasingly central role in the school’s teaching in the wake of the establish-
ment of its architecture department in 1927. It was first headed by the Swiss architect
Hannes Meyer, who also served as the Director of the school. Under the leadership
of the openly left-wing Meyer (1927–1930), the teaching became politicised and he
was eventually dismissed from his post.^312 His successor, Mies van der Rohe, strived to
relieve the pressures created by the increasingly tense political climate in Germany and
to develop Bauhaus as a politically neutral school of architecture and applied arts.^313
Some of the ideas of Bauhaus were conveyed to Aalto by László Moholy-Nagy, who
taught at the school, was a close collaborator of Gropius and visited the Aaltos in
Finland with his partner during their trip to the Nordic countries in summer 1931.^314
Bauhausbücher, the Bauhaus book series, discussing artistic, social and scientific
issues from topical perspectives, began to be published in 1925.^315 The first volume
to be published was Walter Gropius’ Internationale Architektur (International Archi-
tecture). According to Gropius, new architecture was about combining architecture
and technology and about penetrating to the very essence of phenomena. Designs,
whether for a piece of furniture or an entire house, had to be functional. In his view,
examining the problematics of a building was always linked with mechanics, stat-
ics, optics, acoustics and the world of interrelations. For him, matter and structure
embodied interrelations in the way that the designer had intended. The aim of mod-
ern architecture, as far as Gropius was concerned, was to move away from personal
and national towards objectivity.^316
The books included a magnificent series of images on topical architecture from
one-family homes to cities. The main focus was on residential buildings (42), facto-
ries (20) and offices (12). The designs for blocks of flats incorporated the ideal of social
responsibility. The frame designed by Marcel Breuer, introduced in Internationale
Architektur, was in terms of basic structural concept and rhythm reminiscent of the
frame of A wing at Paimio Sanatorium.^317 The featured one-family houses included
homes for the wealthy as well as studies on houses that could be serially produced. The
312 Droste 1991, pp. 190 and 196–200.
313 Droste 1991, pp. 204–238.
314 Göran Schildt has described Moholy-Nagy’s and Aalto’s friendhip. Schildt 1985, pp. 70–78.
315 Hahn 1981 [1925], p. II.
316 Gropius 1981 [1925], p. 7.
317 The projects had such titles as "Entwurf zu einem Miethausblock", "Entwurf zu einem Grossen Miethaus" or "Mo-
dell zu einem Etagenhaus für Kleinwohnungen" (Sketch for an Apartment Building; Sketch for a Large Apartment
Building; or Model for a Block of Flats). Gropius 1981 [1925], especially p. 90.