Left: A Beaux-Arts period architectural perspective (anonymous, 18th century). Right: A drawing by László Moholy-Nagy from 1919, who would join the Bauhaus as an instructor in 1923.

Architecture schools have long held a significant role in shaping the field of architectural visualization. Through fostering particular artistic philosophies, drawing techniques, and design ideologies, such institutions shape not only the architects themselves but also the way they convey their ideas to others. 

In this latest edition of Archinect In-Depth: Visualization, we explore the impact of two influential schools of architecture, the École des Beaux-Arts in France and the Bauhaus in Germany, both of whom continue to exert an influence on our approach to architectural visualization today.

Visualization before architectural education

Architecture schools have long played a pivotal role in shaping not only the design sensibilities of the architecture students enrolled within them but also in propagating new styles, methods, and technologies in the communication and visualization of architectural form. The way in which an architect represents a building, be it through perspective, orthographic projection, models, virtual reality, and so on, is an outcome not only of their own individual creativity but of the outlook of the architecture school they emerged from.

Of course, the discipline of architectural visualization vastly predates architecture schools. While the first educational institution dedicated definitively to architectural training was established in 1671, history’s earliest architectural drawings date back 9,000 years. 

As a previous article in this Archinect In-Depth: Visualization series demonstrated, some of history’s most consequential contributions to the field of architectural visualization emerged before the formalization of architectural education. In particular, Brunelleschi’s formalization of the technique of linear perspective came over 200 years before the first architecture school. 

By fostering particular artistic philosophies, drawing techniques, and design ideologies, these institutions shape not only the architects themselves but also the way they convey their ideas to others. 

Such new visualization techniques may not have been propagated within architecture school studios but were nonetheless codified and disseminated by publications such as Alberti’s De pictura (1435) and De re aedificatoria (c.1452), Piero della Francesca’s De Prospectiva Pingendi (c.1474), and exemplary works such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1519) or Étienne-Louis Boullée's Deuxieme projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi (1785).

With the establishment of architecture schools from the seventeenth century onwards, however, architecture students would become exposed to an increasingly formalized, uniform approach to architectural practice, including expected standards on architectural drawing and visualization. By fostering particular artistic philosophies, drawing techniques, and design ideologies, these institutions shape not only the architects themselves but also the way they convey their ideas to others. 

Among the most influential of these institutions were the École des Beaux-Arts in France and the Bauhaus in Germany, both of which dramatically impacted architectural visualization in ways that continue to resonate today.

The École des Beaux-Arts: Mastering classical visualization

The École des Beaux-Arts, originally established in 1671, was one of the most prestigious institutions for architecture, painting, and sculpture in France. The institution exerted a powerful influence on architectural education globally by the 19th century, popularizing a structured approach to design rooted in classical Greek and Roman aesthetics. The Beaux-Arts approach emphasized opulence, beauty, and harmony, leading students to produce works that were highly detailed, often with dramatic lighting and intricate ornamentation. This classical training aimed to cultivate a sense of refinement and grandeur in architectural visualization, reflecting a commitment to artistry and meticulous detail.

Architectural visualization at the Beaux-Arts was grounded in traditional hand-drawing techniques that emphasized the skilled depiction of scale, proportion, and composition. Students were encouraged to visualize structures through complex renderings that demonstrated not only structural design but also architectural details and an envisioned ambiance. Beaux-Arts drawings were showcased to the public for their intricate line work, depth, and attention to the full experience of a building, including its surrounding landscape, often framing architecture within a picturesque setting to evoke a sense of permanence.

Despite the era’s popularization of perspective, explored in our previous article in the Archinect In-Depth: Visualization series, architectural representation in the Beaux-Arts relied little on perspectival geometry. Instead, visualization within the Beaux-Arts was anchored by plans, elevations, longitudinal sections, and cross sections rendered with orthogonal lines with depth, volume, and perspective implied by a strong reliance on shadows and watercolor rendering.

Beaux-Arts drawings were showcased to the public for their intricate line work, depth, and attention to the full experience of a building, including its surrounding landscape, often framing architecture within a picturesque setting to evoke a sense of permanence.

“Sometimes broad gestural washes of color were added to the sheet, to situate a building in its imagined topography or urban environment, transforming the otherwise flat orthographic designs into grand architectural paintings,” Basile Baudez and Maureen Cassidy-Geiger note in an essay on the subject for Drawing Matter. “More than just a style of architecture or a set of conventions — the reliance on classical examples, monumentality achieved through clear lines and symmetry, and the profusion of ornaments — the legacy of the Beaux-Arts lies in the proficiency of its students, who could conceive an extremely clear and enticing rendering of any architectural project in two dimensions.”

The elaborate visualization techniques practiced within the Beaux-Arts were honed further by the school’s rigorous competition-based pedagogy. While practical architectural skills were learned not at the school but within a studio-based Atelier system, the academy hosted rigorous drawing competitions (concours) that served as a platform for students to showcase their design and representation abilities. Two concours were operated within the school: Concours d’essai or esquisse (sketching competitions) lasting 12 hours and Concours rendus (rendering projects) spanning several weeks. 

The artistic conventions of the Beaux-Arts would alter the course of architectural education far beyond its Parisian roots. When William Robert Ware founded the first U.S. architectural department at MIT in 1868, he did so with a curriculum that explicitly modeled itself on the École des Beaux-Arts, including its focus on design competitions and visualization conventions. Ware’s approach quickly spread to other institutions, shaping architectural education in the United States to this day. 

The Bauhaus: Less is more

As U.S. institutions continued to adopt a Beaux-Arts-inspired approach to education in the early 20th century, a new force was emerging from Germany that would challenge the Beaux-Arts grounding in the ornate and elaborate. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus was a response to the growing industrialization and technological advancements of the time. From its original base in Weimar, Gropius envisioned a school that combined art, craft, and technology, departing from the elaborate, classical aesthetics of the Beaux-Arts toward a focus on function, materiality, and efficiency. The Bauhaus emphasized the importance of simplicity, rationality, and functionalism, advocating for a break from the past and a move toward the modern.

Bauhaus architectural visualization was characterized by its focus on clarity, abstraction, and practicality. The school discouraged the ornate, theatrical depictions typical of Beaux-Arts visualizations, instead favoring more minimal, geometric representations. Students were trained to use basic shapes, clean lines, and straightforward compositions to represent their ideas. Bauhaus drawings were often stark, composed of black-and-white line work or simple colored blocks, which allowed for a clear understanding of form, function, and material without unnecessary ornamentation. This modernist approach to architectural visualization aligned with the Bauhaus philosophy of “form follows function.”

From its original base in Weimar, Gropius envisioned a school that combined art, craft, and technology, departing from the elaborate, classical aesthetics of the Beaux-Arts toward a focus on function, materiality, and efficiency. 

“Assignments relating to abstract formal compositions serve to improve thinking and at the same time spurs the development of new techniques of representation,” influential Bauhaus instructor Johannes Itten would remark about the school’s ethos. A Swiss expressionist painter and theorist who originally enrolled at the Beaux-Arts before leaving dissatisfied with its teaching, Itten’s embrace of the bold, abstract visual language of the Bauhaus over the soft, ornate visual language of Beaux-Arts serves as an appropriate personification for the divergence between the two schools.

Architectural representation within the Bauhaus was equally informed by the school’s grounding in industrial design and technology. Where the Beaux-Arts encouraged artistic, atmospheric treatment of architectural drawings through shadow and watercolors, the Bauhaus promoted the use of axonometric projection allowing viewers to understand building dimensions and layouts from multiple angles simultaneously. This functional, scientific approach to visualization not only embodied the Bauhaus commitment to honesty in materials and design but spoke to the new age of industrialization, standardization, and modularity from which the Bauhaus emerged.

Meanwhile, where the Beaux-Arts medium of representation was anchored by established practices of hand-drawn orthographic activated to shadow and watercolor, the Bauhaus distinguished itself through an embrace of new technologies in visualization. Among these technologies was photography, which students exploited as a means of reimagining how built architecture could be read and manipulated. Though Walter Gropius used photography for documentation and publicity purposes in the school’s early years, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy popularized its experimental use among students in 1923.

“His photographs of the Dessau Bauhaus building, for example, are in no sense mechanical reproductions of reality,” the Bauhaus Archive notes. “Instead, they approach it actively using unconventional and even daring perspectives — and thus define a new relationship between people and architecture.”

“The progressive sense of life this expressed was quickly taken up by other Bauhaus photographers,” the archive adds. “Their photos reflect the life, utopianism and spirit of fresh departures of a new era. Not least through his photograms, collages and multiple-exposure shots, Moholy-Nagy inspired the Bauhaus members to a new way of looking that provided the basis for experimentally exploring and making use of the medium’s potential.”

Two schools of thought

Both the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus schools left indelible marks on architectural visualization, each influencing how architecture is represented, conceptualized, and understood. Where the Beaux-Arts championed a grand, idealized vision of architecture, emphasizing artistic expression and ornate detail, the Bauhaus advocated for a functional, objective approach grounded in modernity and technological advancements. 

Though these schools represented opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of philosophy and visualization style, each contributed lessons and precedents in architectural representation that remain relevant today. Where the Beaux-Arts’ emphasis on perspective and rendering techniques still informs many traditional drawing practices and school structures today, the Bauhaus’ modernist abstraction paved the way for contemporary digital tools that prioritize efficiency, clarity, and function.

In a new technological landscape of the twenty-first century, where innovations from artificial intelligence to gaming engines to virtual reality continue to offer architects new media with which to represent built and unbuilt schemes alike, the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus each serve as points of reference for the opportunity of architecture schools as incubators for experimentation in how we imagine and experience the built environment.