prehaus, haus, and post-haus

2. prehaus, haus, and post-haus shifting models in foundation art teaching dancollins-arizona state university [chair] dean adams-montana state university ben cunningham- associate professor - millersville university nancymata- associate professor - millersville university liz miller-webster university worldwide -pietzwartinstitute fate 2013 savannah april 4

3. prehaus, haus, and post-haus shifting models in foundation art teaching dancollins-arizona state university [chair] Dan Collins joined the School of Art faculty at Arizona State University in 1989. He is founding Co-Director of the PRISM lab (a 3D modeling and prototyping facility) and coordinator of the foundation art program (artCore). Collins studied studio art and art history at the University of California, Davis receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Art Education from Stanford University (1975), a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in "New Forms" and Sculpture from UCLA (1984), and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from ASU (2009). fate 2013 savannah april 4

4. prehaus, haus, and post-haus shifting models in foundation art teaching dean adams-montana state university fate 2013 savannah april 4

5. prehaus, haus, and post-haus shifting models in foundation art teaching nancymata- associate professor - millersville university fate 2013 savannah april 4

6. prehaus, haus, and post-haus shifting models in foundation art teaching ben cunningham- associate professor - millersville university fate 2013 savannah april 4

7. prehaus, haus, and post-haus shifting models in foundation art teaching liz miller-webster university worldwide -pietzwartinstitute - netherlands fate 2013 savannah april 4

8. PREHAUS, HAUS, AND POSTHAUS Bauhaus Walter Gropius 1926 Dessau, Germany

9. Bauhaus History The Bauhaus was born in 1919 after Walter Gropius was permitted to combine the schools of art and craft in Weimar, Germany. Ordinary craftsmen as well as famous artists such as Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky were hired to teach. Gropius felt that an understanding of materials, which was taught in workshops that included metalwork, carpentry, interior design, construction, and furniture making, must be mastered before architecture. His goal was to create: A clear, organic architecture, whose inner logic will be radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries; we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast motor cars, and architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its forms (Stokstad 1081).

10. bauhaus history The Bauhaus is often solely remembered for its iconic buildings designed and built in Dessau by Walter Gropius. But in fact, the school had three distinct iterations in three separate geographic locations—Weimer (1919 - 1925); Dessau (1925 – 1932); and Berlin (1932 – 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. Weimar (1919-1925) Dessau (1925 – 1932) Berlin (1932 – 1933)

11. Bauhaus History: Berlin (1932 – 1933) .[18] [edit] Berlin In late 1932, Mies rented a derelict factory in Berlin to use as the new Bauhaus with his own money. The students and faculty rehabilitated the building, painting the interior white. The school operated for ten months without further interference from the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Gestapo closed down the Berlin school. Mies protested the decision, eventually speaking to the head of the Gestapo, who agreed to allow the school to re-open. However, shortly after receiving a letter permitting the opening of the Bauhaus, Mies and the other faculty agreed to voluntarily shut down the school.[18] Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural policy before they came to power in 1933, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had already labeled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for communists and social liberals. Indeed, a number of communist students loyal to Meyer moved to the Soviet Union when he was fired in 1930. Even before the Nazis came to power, political pressure on Bauhaus had increased. The Nazi movement, from nearly the start, denounced the Bauhaus for its "degenerate art", and the Nazi regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as the foreign, probably Jewish influences of "cosmopolitan modernism." Despite Gropius's protestations that as a war veteran and a patriot his work had no subversive political intent, the Berlin Bauhaus was pressured to close in April 1933. Emigrants did succeed, however, in spreading the concepts of the Bauhaus to other countries, including the “New Bauhaus” of Chicago:[19]Mies decided to emigrate to the United States for the directorship of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago and to seek building commissions.[a] Curiously, however, some Bauhaus influences lived on in Nazi Germany. When Hitler's chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began opening the new autobahn (highways) in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations were "bold examples of modernism" – among those submitting designs was Mies van der Rohe.[20]

12. PreHaus, Haus, and Post-Haus: Shifting Models in Foundation Art Teaching Dan Collins, Arizona State University, Chair Dean Adams, Montana State U Ben Cunningham, Associate Professor, Millersville University Nancy Mata, Associate Professor, Millersville University Liz Miller, Webster University, Worldwide, Piet ZwartInstitute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands FATE 2013 Savannah College of Art and Design April 4, 2013

13. Shifting Models for Foundation Teaching Responding literally to the title (postHaus) of FATE 2013, this panel—entitled preHaus, Haus, and postHaus—explores the shifting models of foundation art teaching from the 19th century through the 21st. While the dependency on “Bauhaus” models of instruction is well known, less understood is the history and critique of foundations curricula and program design “pre- and “post-” the Bauhaus. If postHaus characterizes the challenges for the present and immediate future, how does a critical reflection of “preHaus” help us to understand the current context for basic art instruction? And by extension, how can we prepare for a post-postHaus future world? The current "elements and principles" relied upon for some eight decades— our inherited “Haus” —by foundation teachers should be updated to reflect the changing nature of the field and the socio-cultural context in which we live. The original elements and principles as formulated by Arthur Wesley Dow in the early 20th century were developed in a cultural moment that was essentially preelectronic— pre-radio, pre-television, pre-computer, pre-internet. A 21st century curriculum needs to be responsive to the dynamic and emergent conditions and requirements of its culture. The objective elements (line, shape, texture, value, etc) and principles (unity, emphasis, balance, rhythm, scale/proportion, etc.), while relevant to studio practice, provide little foundation in those skills and heuristic strategies that are essential in our shared and increasingly interconnected world. For this panel, I want to attract current GTAs as well as jaded historians, constructivist theorists, futurologists, and (even) artists.

14. Bauhaus History The Bauhaus was born in 1919 after Walter Gropius was permitted to combine the schools of art and craft in Weimar, Germany. Ordinary craftsmen as well as famous artists such as Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky were hired to teach. Gropius felt that an understanding of materials, which was taught in workshops that included metalwork, carpentry, interior design, construction, and furniture making, must be mastered before architecture. His goal was to create: A clear, organic architecture, whose inner logic will be radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries; we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast motor cars, and architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its forms (Stokstad 1081).

15. Bauhaus Curriculum: Verkors Gropius’s reference to formmeisters refers to the particular Bauhaus curriculum, which was workshop-based. An artisan, the handwerkmeister, taught students the materials and techniques while an artist, the formmeister, taught design. Michael J. Lewis, writing in the New Criterion, describes the system: Emphasis was placed on hands-on learning, along the lines laid out a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten who also created its famous “gifts,” a sequence of increasingly complex blocks that acquainted children with tools for perceiving the world, and in which intellectual and tactile learning were simultaneous and inseparable. Transferred to adult students, the principle was the same, with the idea that the abstract lessons learned in one craft might be transferred readily to another, abolishing traditional divisions between artistic media. Thus did painters, the majority of the faculty, find themselves filling odd-seeming roles. According to Lewis: The assignments that the Bauhaus thrust upon its painters still beggar belief — Klee taught bookbinding and Albers cabinetry; only in the Italian Renaissance, with its belief in disegno, do we find anything like this will to overthrow the guild-enforced walls that divide artistic media and segregate fine art from the applied arts.

16. Pre-Bauhaus: Bauhutten Pre-Bauhaus Europe To understand pre-Bauhaus Europe, one must first understand Bauhaus and the philosophy behind it. The “House of Building,” or Bauhaus, was the creation of Walter Gropius (1883-1969) during 1919 to 1933. Gropius was an admirer of the Bauhutten, the medieval building guilds of Germany, and wished to resurrect them through the union of modern art and industry. In a time of innumerable transformations Gropius wished to unite the efforts of architects, artists and designers into what he called “cultural synthesis.”

17. Bauhaus: Hannes Meyer • Hans Emil "Hannes" Meyer (November 18, 1889 – July 19, 1954) was a Swissarchitect and second director of the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930.Walter Gropius appointed Meyer head of the Bauhaus architecture department when it was finally established in April 1927. (Stam had been Gropius's first choice.) Meyer brought his radical functionalist viewpoint he named, in 1929, Die neueBaulehre (the new way to build),[4] that architecture was an organizational task with no relationship to aesthetics, that buildings should be low cost and designed to fulfill social needs. Although he was fired for allegedly politicizing the school, scholars have shown that to be incorrect. • Meyer brought the two most significant building commissions for the school, both of which still stand: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau called Laubenganghäuser Dessau which translates to 'Arcade Houses'. The apartments are considered to be 'real' Bauhaus buildings because they originated through the Bauhaus department of Architecture. The development bordered on an existing housing estate which was designed by Walter Gropius. [5] The other major building commission was the headquarters of the Federal School of the AllgemeinerDeutscherGewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), a confederation of German trade unions, in Bernau. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929. The Trade Union School’s purpose was to provide further education to administrators and leaders of the trade union movement on such topics as economics, management, labor law, and industrial hygiene. The school operated for only three years until the Nazis confiscated the building for use as an SS training facility during World War II. [6] • After Gropius appointed Meyer to replace him as the school's director (1928-1930), Meyer continued with Gropius' innovations to focus on designing prototypes for serial mass production and functionalist architecture. In the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, Dessau's Mayor Hesse alleged that Meyer allowed a Communist student organization to gain traction and bring bad publicity to the school, threatening its survival. Mayor Hesse of Dessau fired him, with a monetary settlement, on August 1, 1930.[7] Meyer's open letter in a left-wing newspaper two weeks later characterizes the Bauhaus as "Incestuous theories (blocking) all access to healthy, life-oriented design... As head of the Bauhaus, I fought the Bauhaus style".[8]

18. Bauhaus: Definition literally "house of construction", stood for "School of Building“ Gropius inventedthe name 'Bauhaus ' not only because it specifically referred to bauen ('building', 'construction') -- but also because of its similarity to the word Bauhütte, the medieval guild of builders and stonemasons out of which Freemasonry sprang. The Bauhaus was to be a kind of modern Bauhütte, therefore, in which craftsmen would work on common projects together, the greatest of which would be buildings in which the arts and crafts would be combined.“ Whitford, Frank, ed. The Bauhaus: Masters & Students by Themselves. London: Conran Octopus. p. 32. ISBN 1850294151. "...

19. Bauhaus: Typography Type designed by Herbert Bayer for the Bauhaus in Dessau, above the entrance to the workshop block. Jim Hood, May 2005

20. Bauhaus Curriculum: Verkors Gropius’s reference to formmeisters refers to the particular Bauhaus curriculum, which was workshop-based. An artisan, the handwerkmeister, taught students the materials and techniques while an artist, the formmeister, taught design. Michael J. Lewis, writing in the New Criterion, describes the system: Emphasis was placed on hands-on learning, along the lines laid out a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten who also created its famous “gifts,” a sequence of increasingly complex blocks that acquainted children with tools for perceiving the world, and in which intellectual and tactile learning were simultaneous and inseparable. Transferred to adult students, the principle was the same, with the idea that the abstract lessons learned in one craft might be transferred readily to another, abolishing traditional divisions between artistic media. Thus did painters, the majority of the faculty, find themselves filling odd-seeming roles. According to Lewis: The assignments that the Bauhaus thrust upon its painters still beggar belief — Klee taught bookbinding and Albers cabinetry; only in the Italian Renaissance, with its belief in disegno, do we find anything like this will to overthrow the guild-enforced walls that divide artistic media and segregate fine art from the applied arts.

21. Bauhaus: History 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.

22. Bauhaus: History http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Bauhaus.pdf The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts school founded by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906 and directed by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde.[11] When van de Velde was forced to resign in 1915 because he was Belgian, he suggested Gropius, Hermann Obrist and August Endell as possible successors. In 1919, after delays caused by the destruction of World War I and a lengthy debate over who should head the institution and the socio-economic meanings of a reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts (an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution integrating the two called the Bauhaus.[12] In the pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition entitled "Exhibition of Unknown Architects", Gropius proclaimed his goal as being "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Gropius' neologism Bauhaus references both building and the Bauhütte, a premodern guild of stonemasons.[13] The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. In 1919 Swiss painter Johannes Itten, German-American painter Lyonel Feininger, and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, along with Gropius, comprised the faculty of the Bauhaus. By the following year their ranks had grown to include German painter, sculptor and designer Oskar Schlemmer who headed the theater workshop, and Swiss painter Paul Klee, joined in 1922 by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. A tumultuous year at the Bauhaus, 1922 also saw the move of Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg to Weimar to promote De Stijl ("The Style"), and a visit to the Bauhaus by Russian Constructivist artist and architect El Lissitzky.[14]

23. Bauhaus: History To involve the students of the Bauhaus, the interior decoration of the entire building was done by the wall painting workshop, the lighting fixtures by the metal workshop, and the lettering by the print shop.  With the Bauhaus building, Gropius thoughtfully laid out his notion of the building as a ‘total work’ of compositional architecture.

24. Bauhaus History: Joseph Itten 1919-1922 From 1919 to 1922 the school was shaped by the pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of Johannes Itten, who taught the Vorkursor 'preliminary course' that was the introduction to the ideas of the Bauhaus.[12] Itten was heavily influenced in his teaching by the ideas of Franz Cižek and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. He was also influenced in respect to aesthetics by the work of the BlaueReiter group in Munich as well as the work of Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. The influence of German Expressionism favored by Ittenwas analogous in some ways to the fine arts side of the ongoing debate. This influence culminated with the addition of Der BlaueReiter founding member Wassily Kandinsky to the faculty and ended when Itten resigned in late 1922. Itten was replaced by the Hungarian designer László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the Vorkurswith a leaning towards the New Objectivity favored by Gropius, which was analogous in some ways to the applied arts side of the debate. Although this shift was an important one, it did not represent a radical break from the past so much as a small step in a broader, more gradual socio-economic movement that had been going on at least since 1907 when van de Velde had argued or a craft basis for design which Hermann Muthesius had begun implementing industrial prototypes.[14]

25. preHaus History: Frederick Froebel 1820 - 1900 Gropius’s reference to formmeisters refers to the particular Bauhaus curriculum, which was workshop-based. An artisan, the handwerkmeister, taught students the materials and techniques while an artist, the formmeister, taught design. Michael J. Lewis, writing in the New Criterion, describes the system: Emphasis was placed on hands-on learning, along the lines laid out a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten who also created its famous “gifts,” a sequence of increasingly complex blocks that acquainted children with tools for perceiving the world, and in which intellectual and tactile learning were simultaneous and inseparable. Transferred to adult students, the principle was the same, with the idea that the abstract lessons learned in one craft might be transferred readily to another, abolishing traditional divisions between artistic media. Thus did painters, the majority of the faculty, find themselves filling odd-seeming roles. According to Lewis: The assignments that the Bauhaus thrust upon its painters still beggar belief — Klee taught bookbinding and Albers cabinetry; only in the Italian Renaissance, with its belief in disegno, do we find anything like this will to overthrow the guild-enforced walls that divide artistic media and segregate fine art from the applied arts.

26. preHaus History: Frederick Froebel 1820 - 1900 Gropius’s reference to formmeisters refers to the particular Bauhaus curriculum, which was workshop-based. An artisan, the handwerkmeister, taught students the materials and techniques while an artist, the formmeister, taught design. Michael J. Lewis, writing in the New Criterion, describes the system: Emphasis was placed on hands-on learning, along the lines laid out a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten who also created its famous “gifts,” a sequence of increasingly complex blocks that acquainted children with tools for perceiving the world, and in which intellectual and tactile learning were simultaneous and inseparable. Transferred to adult students, the principle was the same, with the idea that the abstract lessons learned in one craft might be transferred readily to another, abolishing traditional divisions between artistic media. Thus did painters, the majority of the faculty, find themselves filling odd-seeming roles. According to Lewis: The assignments that the Bauhaus thrust upon its painters still beggar belief — Klee taught bookbinding and Albers cabinetry; only in the Italian Renaissance, with its belief in disegno, do we find anything like this will to overthrow the guild-enforced walls that divide artistic media and segregate fine art from the applied arts.

27. preHaus History: Frederick Froebel 1782 - 1852 Friedrich Froebel revolutionized education by developing the first widely accepted method for early childhood education. His Kindergarten was intended as a prepared environment in which children were nurtured by parents and teachers as gardeners of the child’s potential.

28. preHaus History: Frederick Froebel 1782 - 1852 • Frank Lloyd Wright • "The maple wood blocks . . . are in my fingers to this day," said Frank Lloyd Wright, attesting to the influence of the Froebel blocks on his work. The blocks were developed by Friedrich Froebel in the 1830s for children to learn the elements of geometric form, mathematics and creative design. • Frank Lloyd Wright was interested in architecture early in his life and his mother purchased a set of Froebel kindergarten blocks at the Centennial Expostition in Philadelphia so that he could begin building. Frank was fascinated by the blocks and much of his architectural design was influenced by the geometric shapes he experiemented with as a child. • "Now came the geometric play of these charming checkered colour combinations! The structural figues to be made with peas and small straight sticks; slender constructions, the jointings accented by the little green pea globes. The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterwards leaves the fingers: so form became feeling. And the box with a mast to set upon it, on which to hang with string the maple cubes and spheres and triangles, revolving them to discover subordinate forms" • "That early kindergarten experience with the straight line; the flat plane; the square; the triangle; the circle! If I wanted more, the square modified by the triangle gave the hexagon, the circle modified by the straight line would give the octagon. Adding thickness, getting 'sculpture' thereby, the square became the cube, the triangle the tetrahedron, the circle the sphere." • "These primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects . . . which were ever got into the architecture of the world" • Frank Lloyd Wright, from An Autobiography • During his lifetime, Frank Lloyd Wright assimilated many influences into his architecture. The earliest of these influences, which was to have a lasting effect upon him, was the kindergarten method of Friedrich Froebel. Wright's mother introduced him to Froebel's ideas and to Froebelian toys. They consisted of geometric blocks to assemble in different ways, encouraging the child's sense of three-dimensional composition, and paper to fold in various shapes, aiding the child's perception of planar elements. Early in his career, Wright began to construct buildings with a definite geometric clarity, such as the Winslow house in River Forest, Illinois of 1893. The Froebel toys undoubtedly led the way to this type of design, so advanced for its time. In the 1890's, most other architects were still reviving past styles in their designs (the neo-classic was especially popular). • from Frank Lloyd Wright: background

29. preHaus History: Arthur Wesley Dow, 1857 – 1922. Dow taught at major American arts training institutions for 30 years, among them Teachers College, Columbia University; the Art Students League of New York; Pratt Institute; and, from 1900, his own Summer School of Art at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Ideas on teaching art His ideas were quite revolutionary for the period; he taught that rather than copying nature, art should be created by elements of the composition, like line, mass and color. His ideas were published in the 1899 book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. The following extracts are from the prefatory chapter "Beginnings" to the second edition of this book (1912): Composition ... expresses the idea upon which the method here presented is founded - the "putting together" of lines, masses and colors to make a harmony. ... Composition, building up of harmony, is the fundamental process in all the fine arts. ... A natural method is of exercises in progressive order, first building up very simple harmonies ... Such a method of study includes all kinds of drawing, design and painting. It offers a means of training for the creative artist, the teacher or one who studies art for the sake of culture.

30. Bauhaus History: Stundenplan 1921-1922 Abenakt = evening act gruppe werk = group work ; werkstatt =

31. The bauhaus workshops Practical work in the workshops was the core training element at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus students during the Weimar year were called apprentices, journeymen and master craftsmen in accordance with artisan tradition. They normally sat the journeyman’s exam after three semesters. Only after that were they admitted to the building course which led to a qualification as master craftsman. Each of the workshops had two heads throughout the Weimar years. A master of form, an artist responsible for the design and aesthetic aspect of work, always had at his side a master of crafts, a craftsman who passed on technical skills and abilities. Crafts work was seen as an ideal unity of artistic design and material production. Johannes Itten, who sought to train artists working with their individual peculiarities, was master of form in charge of almost all workshops at the beginning. In the course of 1922 Walter Gropius managed to divert the attention of the Bauhaus toward the needs of industry and appointed László Moholy-Nagy to head the metal workshop. With Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer, almost all masters moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau. Former students became junior masters in charge of the workshops. Josef Albers ran part of the "Vorkurs" (preparatory course), Herbert Bayer was in charge of the typography workshop and Marcel Breuer of the joinery workshop, HinnerkScheper was head of the mural painting workshop, Joost Schmidt taught the sculpture workshop and und GuntaStölzl ran the weaving workshop. The company Bauhaus GmbH (Bauhaus Ltd.) was formed in 1925 to sell the products developed at the Bauhaus. When the workshops moved to the Bauhaus building in Dessau, the masters became professors and henceforth the students received a diploma. The articles included a second objective alongside training, namely the performance of practical experimental work, particularly in house building and interior design, and the development of models for industry and the crafts. All workshops accorded greater importance to collaboration with industry. Furniture and other everyday objects were designed for mass production to enable large sections of the population to buy quality items at prices they could afford. This was underlined in the guiding principle “necessities, not luxuries”, formulated by the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer: New workshops were established, such as the photographic workshop under Walter Peterhans, which formed part of the advertising department. The Bauhaus wallpapers designed in the mural painting workshop were the commercially most successful product. The forms and significance of workshop activities declined considerably under the third Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who subordinated them to architecture employing the designs and materials of the time.

32. Gropius’s reference to formmeisters refers to the particular Bauhaus curriculum, which was workshop-based. An artisan, the handwerkmeister, taught students the materials and techniques while an artist, the formmeister, taught design. Michael J. Lewis, writing in the New Criterion, describes the system: Emphasis was placed on hands-on learning, along the lines laid out a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten who also created its famous “gifts,” a sequence of increasingly complex blocks that acquainted children with tools for perceiving the world, and in which intellectual and tactile learning were simultaneous and inseparable. Transferred to adult students, the principle was the same, with the idea that the abstract lessons learned in one craft might be transferred readily to another, abolishing traditional divisions between artistic media. Thus did painters, the majority of the faculty, find themselves filling odd-seeming roles. According to Lewis: The assignments that the Bauhaus thrust upon its painters still beggar belief — Klee taught bookbinding and Albers cabinetry; only in the Italian Renaissance, with its belief in disegno, do we find anything like this will to overthrow the guild-enforced walls that divide artistic media and segregate fine art from the applied arts.