Bauhaus Ulm

A new Bauhaus is founded in Ulm: after the Second World War, this news spread quickly among former Bauhaus residents and all those involved in architecture and product design. The initiative for this came from the HfG founders Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill; Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius gave them permission to name their school “Hochschule für Gestaltung” after the Bauhaus subtitle.

The HfG founders also received support from the former Bauhaus students Walter Peterhans, Josef Albers, Helene Nonné-Schmidt and Johannes Itten, who took over part of the basic teaching at the HfG in the 1950s. Others such as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Gustav Hassenpflug, Herbert Bayer or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe came to Ulm to have Max Bill introduce them to the project and guide them through the new building, which in some respects referred to Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus building. The exhibition in the HfG Archive deals with the early days of the Hochschule für Gestaltung, in which the Bauhaus and its principles were still present and influential: The starting point for the HfG’s own path, which it then took with regard to the training of designers and for which Tomas Maldonado conceived a “visual methodology”.

An exhibition project as part of the 100th anniversary programme of the Bauhaus: