Beginning in the mid-19th century, reformers led by the English designer William Morris (Morris, William) had sought to bridge the same division by emphasizing high-quality handicrafts in combination with design appropriate to its purpose. By the last decade of that century, these efforts had led to the Arts and Crafts Movement. While extending the Arts and Crafts attentiveness to good design for every aspect of daily living, the forward-looking Bauhaus rejected the Arts and Crafts emphasis on individually executed luxury objects. Realizing that machine production had to be the precondition of design if that effort was to have any impact in the 20th century, Gropius directed the school's design efforts toward mass (mass production) manufacture. On the example of Gropius' ideal, modern designers have since thought in terms of producing functional and aesthetically pleasing objects for mass society rather than individual items for a wealthy elite.

Before being admitted to the workshops, students at the Bauhaus were required to take a six-month preliminary course taught variously by Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy. The workshops—carpentry, metal, pottery, stained glass, wall painting, weaving, graphics, typography, and stagecraft—were generally taught by two people: an artist (called the Form Master), who emphasized theory, and a craftsman, who emphasized techniques and technical processes. After three years of workshop instruction, the student received a journeyman's diploma.

The Bauhaus included among its faculty several outstanding artists of the 20th century. In addition to the above-mentioned, some of its teachers were Paul Klee (stained-glass and painting), Wassily Kandinsky (wall painting), Lyonel Feininger (graphic arts), Oskar Schlemmer (stagecraft and also sculpture), Marcel Breuer (interiors), Herbert Bayer (typography and advertising), Gerhard Marcks (pottery), and Georg Muche (weaving). A severe but elegant geometric style carried out with great economy of means has been considered characteristic of the Bauhaus, though in fact the works produced were richly diverse.

Although Bauhaus members had been involved in architectural work from 1919 (notably, the construction in Dessau of administrative, educational, and residential quarters designed by Gropius), the department of architecture, central to Gropius' program in founding this unique school, was not established until 1927; Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect, was appointed chairman. Upon Gropius' resignation the following year, Meyer became director of the Bauhaus until 1930. He was asked to resign because of his left-wing political views, which brought him into conflict with Dessau authorities. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig) became the new director until the Nazi regime forced the school to close in 1933.

The Bauhaus had far-reaching influence. Its workshop products were widely reproduced, and widespread acceptance of functional, unornamented designs for objects of daily use owes much to Bauhaus precept and example. Bauhaus teaching methods and ideals were transmitted throughout the world by faculty and students. Today, nearly every art curriculum includes foundation courses in which, on the Bauhaus model, students learn about the fundamental elements of design. Among the best known of Bauhaus-inspired educational efforts was the achievement of Moholy-Nagy (Moholy-Nagy, László), who founded the New Bauhaus (later renamed the Institute of Design) in Chicago in 1937, the same year in which Gropius was appointed chairman of the Harvard School of Architecture. A year later Mies moved to Chicago to head the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (then known as the Armour Institute), and eventually he designed its new campus.