Nicholas Fox Weber - iBauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design (KNOPF)

So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavored to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive, and create the new building of the future that willrise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come.

This was the goal for which Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, a groundbreaking school and laboratory for modernism. The year was 1919. The Bauhaus would soon have workshops to develop new textiles, chairs, tables, flatware, lamps, childrens toys, and a range of other everyday objects that would revolutionize the way human beings lived all over the world. Prototypes would be made for objects that could be manufactured on a large scale, all of them designed to ameliorate daily existence. While performing needed tasks, they would add charm through their aesthetic grace. The stuff of life was to be absent ornament. Honest, clean, easily maintained, and visually appealing; it would create a new emotional ease.

Worldwide, humankind was to have materials of impeccable construction. They would be compact, sleek, and able to achieve multiple functions. These revolutionary objects would facilitate unprecedented possibilities for everyday existence. And they would be playful as well as useful. The sense of fun alongside the candid This is what I am and this is what I do was to transform the human spirit. Designcapable of miracles, truthful and alluringwas the new religion.

The Bauhaus started in a former arts-and-crafts school in the small, historic German city of Weimar. In 1925, it moved to ample new headquarters that Gropius designed for it in Dessau, a rather isolated industrial city. The building epitomized the handsome, streamlined style the school advocated for design of every sort. After the new right-wing government forced its closure in 1932, it had one last desultory year in a disused telephone factory in Berlin. All in all, it would last only fourteen years. Like all brilliant experiments in new approaches to living, it was both a utopia and a place that struggled to survive.

Much of what is greatest in human existencethe amazing engines that are our bodies, the earth itselfmakes possible and enhances our lives without our necessarily being conscious of the details. The Bauhaus school does not rival the miracles of nature, but it was a determined effort to transform the way things look and give birth to objects that make daily existence infinitely easier. It succeeded. The schools impact greatly exceeds its recognition. Most of the world does not know the name Bauhaus, but the manifestations of its approach to design are everywhere. The achievements of this institutionwhere like-minded people, of dramatically different backgrounds but a shared utopian spirit, gathered together and invented the new pervade our world.

When the Bauhaus opened its sparkling new headquarters in Dessau, everything was straightforward and purposeful. The name itself was what iPhone would be: a startling invention, its two punchy syllables based on the familiar, yet without precedent.