The most influential School of Art, Architecture and Design of the 20th Century celebrates its Centennial in 2019. Until recently, the intense creative relationship that the Bauhaus had with Spain was not well known. Dr. Laura Martínez de Guereñu,  Professor of the IE School of Architecture and Design, has been successfully dedicated in the recent years to investigate and narrate the exchanges and cultural transfers that took place between this German School, Spain and the United States from 1928 to 1975.

One of her most interesting studies (Martínez de Guereñu, L., 2016. Bauhäusler on the Franco-Spanish Border, Architectural Histories, 4 (1), p.15), focuses on the trips to Spain in 1929 of six masters and instructors of the Bauhaus: the architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, and the artists Josef and Anni Albers, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. At the same time, she studies the transportation across the Franco-Spanish border of Bauhaus products to Spain for the construction of German industrial exhibitions at the International Exhibition of Barcelona in 1929.

Dr. de Guereñu explains how these architects and artists brought the principles of modern architecture from central to southern Europe through buildings, interiors, everyday objects and furniture, and at the same time, reveals how they absorbed and expressed the particularities of Spanish culture through photographs, collages of photos, texts, snapshots, letters, postcards and drawings of buildings and landscapes, and finally, analyzes the effect of this trip on the design attitudes and subsequent works of these architects and artists of the Bauhaus School of Art .

You can consult the full article in Open Access here "Bauhäusler on the Franco-Spanish Border"