When: 1919

The Bauhaus manifesto, April 1919

Six folded pages with a cathedral on the front — the document that told Weimar what the new school was for.

In April 1919 Walter Gropius wrote what he called the Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. Everyone now calls it the manifesto.

A pamphlet, not a book

It is a six-page folded sheet, and the art historian Magdalena Droste, writing for the Bauhaus institutions, points out that the thing we call the manifesto is the statement of principles printed inside it alongside the actual programme.^[1] The most quoted sentence in twentieth-century design begins it, set in spaced letters: „Das Endziel aller bildnerischen Tätigkeit ist der Bau!“ — the final goal of all artistic activity is the building.

A cathedral on the cover

Lyonel Feininger, the first master Gropius appointed, cut the woodcut for the title page: a Gothic cathedral in crystalline planes with three stars over its tower.^[2] The stars are read as sculpture, architecture and painting working together on the great building^[1] — which is the whole argument of the school in one image, and it is a medieval building site rather than a machine.

Why a cathedral in 1919

The choice looks backwards and was meant to. The Gothic lodge stood for a time when craftspeople and artists were believed to have worked on one thing together, and a school that proposed to abolish the distinction between them reached for that picture rather than for a factory. Within four years the same school would be arguing publicly about machines and industry; the cover of its founding document is a church.

Sources

Das Bauhaus-Manifest — Bauhaus Kooperation (Magdalena Droste), retrieved 29 August 2026
Lyonel Feininger — Bauhaus Kooperation, retrieved 29 August 2026