I grew up in a small town in former East Germany, located about 20 km from Weimar. A historical home to thinkers and artists such as Johan Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Rudolf Steiner, Weimar was also where the Bauhaus was founded. This design school opened its doors here a little over 100 years ago, as a radical experiment in arts and design education. Walter Gropius, its first Director, had chosen the name Bauhaus in a modern reference to the medieval guilds of craftspeople, called Bauhütten, and a combination of theoretical studio work, practical workshop application and communal living became the school's signature characteristic. Its vision was of ‘an open, experimental structure to give students a wide-ranging character-building education’ (Friedewald, 2009, p 35). This vision was shaped by Gropius’ experiences on the Somme during the First World War, from which he emerged believing in radical social reform in which creative people played a central role. The Bauhaus attracted some of the most avant garde artists of the time, from Paul Klee to Vassili Kandinsky, Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Lionel Feininger. A Swiss educator called Johannes Itten developed the Vorkurs, the precursor of today's arts and design schools’ foundation year, which focused on the development of students’ creative capabilities through cultivating their minds, bodies and souls.

Education at the Bauhaus was characterized by collaborative work and the combination of previously separate disciplines and media, by a general rejection of academicism and by forging links with industry to give students practical experiences and to complement the school's meagre public funds. Although not always able to live up to its ideals, the Bauhaus envisioned a new union of arts, crafts and industry, above all maintaining human and artistic elements under the onslaught of mass production, standardization and industrialization at the beginning of the 20th century. There are important parallels between Germany in the 1920s and the world today. The former was a time of intense political, economic and social upheaval. In the year of the Bauhaus’ founding, the Weimar Republic, Germany's first foray into democracy, was declared in the National Theatre across town from the Bauhaus, against a background of pitched street battles in many German cities between communist and socialist workers and reactionary vigilante groups.