the preliminary course
Every Bauhaus student began with the Vorkurs, a half year of unlearning. What it taught, who taught it, and how a five-minute daily exercise descends from it.
Before a student at the Bauhaus could enter a workshop, they spent a term in the preliminary course, the Vorkurs. It was compulsory and it was strange. There were no chairs to design and no houses to draw. There were materials to handle, contrasts to study, and a great deal of looking.
itten
Johannes Itten ran it from 1919 to 1923, and his version was close to a discipline. Students began with breathing and movement, then drew rhythms, then made studies of contrast: light against dark, rough against smooth, hard against soft, large against small. They built collages from scrap, wood, wire and glass to learn what each material wanted to do. The point was not the object. The point was to clear out what the student thought they already knew about form, and to replace it with attention.
Itten's course was also where color was taught as a material with rules, the twelve-part circle and the seven contrasts. It was the spine of the school's first years, and it was the reason Gropius eventually asked him to leave: Itten's version leaned toward the mystical, and Gropius wanted the school facing industry.
moholy-nagy and albers
From 1923 László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers took the course over and turned it toward construction. Moholy-Nagy set problems in balance and space: structures of wood and wire that had to stand, compositions that had to hold. Albers, who had taken the course as a student, made it about material economy. His famous exercise gave students a sheet of paper and asked what it could become by folding and cutting alone, with nothing added and nothing wasted.
Between them they changed the question from what do you feel about this material to what can this material do. That question is the one the workshops asked, and later the one the school's products answered.
what the course taught
- Seeing comes before making. A term of looking at contrast and material produced better designers than a term of drawing chairs.
- Constraints teach. One sheet of paper, one color, one shape. The limit is the lesson.
- Small and daily beats large and rare. The exercises were short and repeated. Skill came from the repetition, not from any one result.
- Everyone starts with the same alphabet. Painters, weavers and architects did the same exercises, so the school had one visual language before it had any products.
werkstatt
The app's daily exercise is the Vorkurs cut down to five minutes. Find two colors that vibrate is an Itten contrast study. Build a chair from four shapes is Albers' paper exercise with shapes instead of paper. Set a headline in lowercase is a rhythm study with letters. None of them produces anything a person would keep, and that is the point. They produce the seeing that the keeping comes from later.
The same logic shapes this system's rules. A small fixed alphabet, repeated until it is automatic, taught to everyone who touches the product, before anyone is allowed to design a page.