<P> The school existed in three German cities: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect - directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime, having been painted as a centre of communist intellectualism . Although the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world . </P> <P> The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics . For example, the pottery shop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, even though it had been an important revenue source; when Mies van der Rohe took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it . </P> <P> Germany's defeat in World War I, the fall of the German monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, which had been suppressed by the old regime . Many Germans of left - wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism . Such influences can be overstated: Gropius did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely apolitical . Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function . Thus, the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design . </P> <P> However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism . The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus--the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit--were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded . The German national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England . In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries . Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship versus mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members (by 1914). </P>

The bauhaus symbolically represented germany's recovery from which event