What is the place of the art school in modern society?

“The Bauhaus felt it had a double moral responsibility: to make its pupils fully conscious of the age they were living in; and to train them to turn their native intelligence, and the knowledge they received, to practical account in the design of forms which would be the direct expression of that consciousness.” -- Walter Gropius

Das Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar, better known simply as the Bauhaus, was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Barbican. The Bauhaus established itself in opposition to contemporary art academies and the Arts and Crafts movement. The former were seen to be removed from life encouraging a dilettante or amateur attitude insofar as they promoted the "misty aestheticism" of l’art pour l’art. The latter was held to be seeking to turn back the clock on industrial modern life.

Instead the Bauhaus sought direct engagement with commercial operations and factories by developing goods for mass production and ensuring that their students had intimate acquaintance with machines and the most recent technical innovations.

Mechanization promised new tools for the realization of new visions if students were properly trained: "they will know, not only how to make industry adopt their improvements and inventions, but also how to make the machine the vehicle of their ideas".

In this way, the Bauhaus invented the modern notion of the designer, who would "combine form, efficiency and economy". This session looks at Gropius’s 1923 pamphlet "The Theory and Organisation of the Bauhaus (http://www.scribd.com/doc/100591394/Gropius)".

A major exhibition, Bauhaus: Art as Life (http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409), runs at the Barbican until 12 August.