Bauhaus was built upon the utopian phrase “The building of the future“ and sought to blend all the arts into an ideal unity. The school’s master plan needed a new type of artist, for whom the Bauhaus was to offer adequate education. Gropius sought to develop new teaching methods, convinced that the base for any art is found in handcraft, and thus believed that “the school will gradually evolve into a workshop.“ In Bauhaus, artists and craftsmen directed classes, seeking to remove any distinction between fine arts and applied arts. In 1923, the Bauhaus created the new motto “art and technology - a new unity.” The new trend was to apply industrial potentials to design standards, regarding both their functional and aesthetic aspects. The workshops started to manufacture prototypes for mass production, starting with a single lamp to a complete dwelling.

The educational and social claim to a new configuration of life and a corresponding environment could not be so easily achieved. The school’s name became a synonym for the ongoing trend. However, changes in the directorship of the school and among teachers, as well as artistic influences from various sources and the political situation in which the school’s experimental work was staged, resulted in a permanent transformation. The numerous consequences of the experiment flow into contemporary life even today. The Bauhaus was the 20th-century’s emblematic, most important school of design, architecture and art, and has thus left its mark on design to the present day.

Objects from the museum’s collection, the world's largest art ensemble on design, represent the entire spectrum of Bauhaus’ activities, which include architecture, furniture, ceramics, photography, stage pieces, metalwork and student work from the Preliminary Course. They also comprise works by the school’s famous teachers: Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky. The Bauhaus Archive’s holdings cover various fields of the collection, providing documentation on the history of the Bauhaus and showcasing the achievements of the school in art, education, architecture and design. The collection also includes studies from the school courses, workshop design pieces, architectural plans and maquettes, as well as artistic photography, documents, a photographic archive on the history of the Bauhaus and a library.