Reading Time: 2 min | Sep 2021

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Design Icons

iF celebrates 100 Years of Bauhaus

Teatime with Walter Gropius: TAC 1 by Rosenthal honored by iF in 1970

2019 was the year of the Bauhaus – the worldwide most influential school of art, design and ideas celebrated its centenary. We celebrate this avant-garde movement by starting a special design dedicated Bauhaus expert series. What links Bauhaus Icons to iF? As a highlight, we will take you on a journey deep into our iF archives to find traces and names of the Bauhaus. Our first encounter is no other than Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius (1883-1969) himself – and a Teapot by German Porcelain manufacturer Rosenthal.

Architect and Avant-garde master of modernism, Walter Gropius inspired and sculpted the whole idea, aesthetics and  of the Bauhaus. He attracted other architects, artists and designers for his new school in Weimar (1919), later in Dessau, which ideology and key elements outlast time and still influence our aesthetic perception every day!

We at iF are very proud to have one of his designs in the iF Design Excellence: In 1970 he sketched a teapot series TAC 1 by Rosenthal in the discipline “product”.

One year after Gropius' death,

Rosenthal submitted his design for the TAC 1 Teapot, which was honored with an if DESIGN AWARD 1970. The teapot distinguishes itself through Gropius’ typically simple geometrical forms that certainly carry out his significant architectural Bauhaus handwriting. This becomes clear by freely implying the iconic circle and ball as defining elements and Bauhaus symbols for the series design. Typically for Gropius, the teapot´s form follows the teapot’s corpus in every detail.

Read about another Bauhaus Icon - Industrial Design Pioneer Wilhelm Wagenfeld

EXPLORE

The successor “TAC 02” and it´s extended tableware collections is available today with different decors and colors. The collection is a result of a cooperation between the Rosenthal Creative Center and the Bauhaus foundation in Dessau.

“The specialized collaboration enabled this extended program to live up to the great creative abilities of the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius”, explains Rosenthal.

Fun Fact: There was also a formerly entirely independent coffee table series he designed for Rosenthal, that never went into production. Already then, sketches for a table service following the design vocabulary of the successful tea set were lying in a drawer of the product development department.