Bauhaus is the famous German school of design that had inestimable influence on modern architecture, the industrial and graphic arts, and theater design. It was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar as a merger of an art academy and an arts and crafts school. The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It … depended on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. Thus, classes were offered in crafts, typography, and commercial and industrial design, as well as in sculpture, painting, and architecture. The Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornament and ostentatious facades and by harmony between function and the artistic and technical means employed.

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Roman Mosaics

We are all familiar to mosaics, because mosaic design reflects nature and how we see it. Newspaper and magazine photos are composed of lots of little colored dots, and digital photography is an arrangement of pixels or more colored “tiles”. Early people used mosaics for decoration, especially for homes, gardens, roads and walkways. The making of a mosaic, taking small pieces of permanent materials and forming them in abstract or representational designs is one of the earliest and most permanent art forms.

If we talk about the first mosaics, they were probably pebble walkways. It kept down the dust and mud, made the surface more permanent, and was more comfortable to feet.One can still enjoy ancient pebble walkways in China and Europe, created with different colored and shaped stones arranged in intricate patterns.

Five thousand years ago in ancient Babylon, or what is today Iraq and Syria, the Sumerians took mosaics off the prominent design elements, probably reflecting basketry and weaving patterns.

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