Bauhaus Product vs Constructivist Product

Constructivist Product was influenced by Bauhaus Product — Constructivist abstraction (via Lissitzky) strongly shaped Bauhaus design.

Bauhaus table lamps by Jucker (1923–24) and Wagenfeld (1924)

Bauhaus Product

Objects from the German Bauhaus school — lamps, tableware, and furniture reduced to elementary geometry of sphere, cylinder, and cube, designed for the machine and for mass production.

  • Reduction to elementary geometric solids — sphere, cylinder, cone, cube
  • Industrial materials: glass, chromed metal, tubular steel, aluminium
  • Total rejection of applied ornament in favour of bare function
  • Designed as standardized prototypes for machine mass production
  • Primary colours and neutral tones derived from theory, not decoration
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Soviet agitational porcelain plate, State Porcelain Factory, 1920s (British Museum)

Constructivist Product

Revolutionary Soviet objects that put art to work for the new society — geometric agitational porcelain, utilitarian furniture, and worker's clothing, conceived as engineered constructions rather than decoration.

  • Engineered, constructed form — the designer as 'artist-engineer'
  • Dynamic diagonals and intersecting geometric planes
  • Revolutionary red, black, and white palette with bold lettering
  • Multifunctional, collapsible, space-saving utilitarian furniture
  • Agitational imagery and slogans applied to mass objects
Full Constructivist Product guide →

At a glance

Bauhaus ProductConstructivist Product
Era1919–19331917–1932
DisciplineIndustrial DesignIndustrial Design
RegionGermanySoviet Union / Russia
FamilyFunctionalism, Industrial ModernismRevolutionary Modernism, Productivism
Formal traitsgeometric-primary, unornamented, industrial-materials, machine-madegeometric, diagonal-dynamic, red-black-white, utilitarian

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