Institute of Design (Chicago)

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The Institute of Design (ID) in Chicago is the design school of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the most direct American descendant of the German Staatliches Bauhaus. Founded in 1937 as the New Bauhaus by László Moholy-Nagy, who had taught at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928, it brought the method of Gropius's school to the United States and helped make design a true university discipline.

From the New Bauhaus to the School of Design

After the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, many of its masters emigrated. Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian painter, photographer and graphic designer, came to Chicago in 1937 after a spell in London, on Walter Gropius's recommendation and at the invitation of the Association of Art and Industry, to direct a new school. He called it the New Bauhaus and housed it in a Prairie Avenue mansion. The programme was almost identical to the German one: a preliminary course to train the senses and the hand, workshops in materials, light, photography and graphics, the idea of uniting art, technology and industry. After barely a year, because of financial problems, the school closed.

Walter Paepcke and the rebirth

It was saved by Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corporation of America and a great champion of industrial design. With his help Moholy-Nagy reopened it in 1939 as the School of Design in Chicago, which in 1944 was renamed the Institute of Design. Among the teachers was the Hungarian György Kepes, who headed the light and colour area and in 1944 published Language of Vision, one of the most influential books on visual education. Moholy-Nagy described his method in Vision in Motion, published in 1947, after his death from leukaemia in Chicago in 1946.

The postwar years

After Moholy-Nagy the school was directed by the architect Serge Chermayeff (1946–1951), and in 1949 it became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where it became the first institution in the United States to offer a PhD in design. Its teachers included the photographer Harry Callahan, the inventor Buckminster Fuller and the composer John Cage. From 1955 to 1969 it was led by Jay Doblin, who had worked for Raymond Loewy and would go on to found the Unimark International studio with Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda: under him the ID turned towards design methods, research and design for business.

A continuing legacy

Paepcke himself founded the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1951, which for decades brought together designers and industrialists, keeping the Chicago spirit alive. Its tradition continues today within the Illinois Institute of Technology, with teaching devoted to strategic and human-centred design that combines design, business and public policy. From an avant-garde school born of the Bauhaus's exile, it has become one of the places where design learned to think in terms of systems, research and strategy.