The Bauhaus, a completely new kind of art college, was founded in Weimar in 1919 on the basis of a concept developed by Walter Gropius, who was also its director. It became the most influential educational institution for architecture, design, and art in the 20th century. Its name was a play on the ‘Bauhuetten’, i.e. the associations of builders and artisans of the Middle Ages, and many of the most important modern artists taught there. The aim of the institution was to bring together art and crafts, theory and practice. The crowning achievement of these was the Gesamtkunstwerk, the building. This involved using contemporary technology and applying the old virtues of the arts and crafts to the conditions of the industrial age. Indebted to ideas of material and functional suitability, similar to those on which the Werkbund was based, the functionality of products was the main concern. Industrial production was seen as the ultimate aim of the design process. An ‘industrial art’
was to be produced.
J. J. P. Oud, co-founder of the de Stijl movement, as city architect of Rotterdam provided excellent examples of Rationalistic buildings with his Kiefhoek estate and community housing in the Hook of Holland. As early as 1921 he promoted architecture as follows, ‘the tension as it is aesthetically realised in the great rhythm, in the balanced complex of mutually referential and influencing parts, whereby one supports the aesthetic intention of the other,where nothing can either be added or removed, whereby each part in its position and measurement relates so completely to the other parts, in itself and as a whole that any – even the smallest -- change results in a complete destruction of the balance. What today’s architecture lacks in terms of this balance achieved with own resources, it corrects by applying ornament. An ornament-free architecture demands the maximum purity of the architectural composition’. It will be objective without disintegrating into ‘barren Rationalism’ but in that ‘will immediately experience something more elevated’, ‘to unfold the attraction of the cultivated material, the clarity of the glass, the flashing and rounding of the surface, the shining and brilliance of the colour, the glistening of the steel etc.” and hence ‘be able to exceed Classical purity through the absence of all superfluity’.