Digital ACT Reading Practice Question #1559

Based on the passage, early critics and Walter Gropius disagreed fundamentally about whether Bauhaus buildings: Passage Excerpt (Humanities): Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus school sought to demolish the artificial barrier between fine art and functional craft. Rejecting the ornate, bourgeois scrollwork of the Belle Époque, Bauhaus masters championed radical minimalism: 'form follows function.' Buildings and household objects were stripped of superficial ornament and re-imagined around tubular steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete. Critics initially decried the stark geometric facades as cold, institutional, and anti-human. Yet Gropius argued that unadorned industrial design was inherently democratic; mass-produced furniture of elegant simplicity could elevate the aesthetic daily lives of working-class citizens, liberating design from aristocratic luxury.