As soon after World War I, architect Walter Gropius is called to rule the Grandducal Saxonian School of Fine Arts (Sächsische Hochschule für Bildende Kunst) and the Grandducal Saxonian School of Arts and Crafts (Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule), van de Velde's school. He unifies both institutes and founds, in 1919, the Staatliches Bauhaus (State Bauhaus).
The first program, published in the same year, according to Leonardo Benevolo, has a prophetic and obscure tone:
"The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building! The decoration of buildings was once the noblest function of fine arts, and fine arts were indispensable to great architecture. Today they exist in complacent isolation, and can only be rescued by the conscious co-operation and collaboration of all craftsmen. ..."
The State Bauhaus in Weimar is an institution operated by the Free State of Saxony - Weimar - Eisenach, just a few months old at the time. The Bauhaus Manifesto commits it to forging all forms of art into a single whole, to bringing back together all artistic disciplines - sculpture, painting, arts and crafts, and manual trades - and making them integral components of a new art of building: Walter Gropius moves his office from Berlin to Weimar (later joined by Carl Fieger and Ernst Neufert).
Gropius emphasizes three main features of teaching in Bauhaus:
Parallelism between theoretical and practical teaching.
Continuous contact between reality and work.
Presence of creative teachers.
The school is transfered to Dessau in 1925, and later, in 1932, to Berlin. Eventually, the school dissolved itself under pressure from Nazis in 1933.
The Bauhaus is innovative, since it searches breaking dichotomy between art and manufacture. The rationalism that Gropius invokes is not an ideological program but a working method. His thought meets a profound, non conventional liaison with the heritage of humanistic thought.