1919 - 1933 The Bauhaus
Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany. Gropius, an active member of the Deutscher Werkbund, conceives the Bauhaus as an institution dedicated to uniting the fields of art, design and industry in order to elevate the quality of mass production and advance social order in post-war Germany.
[+] The Bauhaus’ influence on the world of architecture remains immense. One of its most famous members and its final director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, once said “the Bauhaus was not an institution with a clear program — it was an idea…The fact that it was an idea,” he believed, “is the cause of the enormous influence the Bauhaus had on every progressive school around the globe. You cannot do that with organization, you cannot do that with propaganda. Only an idea spreads so far…” This idea and the associated belief in the confluence of art and industry greatly affected Hans Knoll and likewise inspired him to help bring modernism, through furniture, to America.