Who founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1919?

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1919. The institution began as an ambitious attempt to reunite fine art, craft, architecture, and design after the upheaval of the First World War.

Gropius established the school on 1 April 1919 by merging Weimar's academy of fine art with its school of arts and crafts. He promoted the idea of a comprehensive artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, in which buildings and their interiors would be designed as unified creations. Students learned through workshops involving materials such as wood, metal, textiles, and glass.

The Bauhaus later moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin in 1932. Gropius directed it until 1928; Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe followed him. The school closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime, but its teachers and graduates spread Bauhaus principles internationally. Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe were major Bauhaus figures, but neither founded the school.