Van de Velde's arts and crafts school, 1902–1915
The school the Bauhaus was built out of: begun as a private seminar in borrowed rooms, closed by ministerial order thirteen years later.
Weimar's modern school did not start with the Bauhaus. It started on 15 October 1902, when Henry van de Velde opened an arts and crafts seminar as a private institute in rooms of the Prellerhaus, the studio building of the town's art school.
A private seminar in borrowed rooms
Van de Velde had been called to Weimar earlier that year as an adviser for Thuringian applied art.[1] The seminar he opened in October 1902 was not a state institution and had no building of its own[2] — it sat in the art school's studio house. Everything the town is now famous for in modern design begins in that arrangement: an adviser without a school, teaching in someone else's rooms.
1 April 1908: a school in its own right
The university's archive records that the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts was officially opened as an independent institution on 1 April 1908, teaching having already begun with sixteen pupils.[2] By then van de Velde had also built it a building — the angled block on the Geschwister-Scholl-Straße that still carries his name.
Closed by order, 1 October 1915
The state ministry ordered the school closed on 1 October 1915.[2] Its Belgian founder had to leave the country as an enemy alien in 1917.[1] What survived was the building, the equipment and an argument — and in April 1919 Walter Gropius merged the dissolved school into the new Staatliches Bauhaus, which is why the Bauhaus had workshops from its first day.
Sources
- Henry van de Velde — Klassik Stiftung Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Universitätsgeschichte — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1863–1957 • architect • designer • founder of the Weimar arts and crafts school
He opened the seminar in 1902 and led the school it became until the state closed it.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, 99423 Weimar
The school that occupied these buildings before the Bauhaus, and built the second of them.
Period
1832–1918
The school belongs to the long century between Goethe's death and the First World War, at its very end.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
Walter Gropius took over a grand-ducal art school in a defeated country and renamed it the Staatliches Bauhaus.
The school Gropius merged in on 12 April — closed by the state in 1915, and the reason the Bauhaus had workshops from day one.
Articles
Weimar's Jugendstil is a style of houses: the villa streets west and south of the old town, built between the 1890s and 1914, with Rudolf Zapfe's façades and Henry van de Velde's own buildings.
The school van de Velde founded and directed until its closure in 1915; he built its house in 1905/06.