De-centering the Bauhaus: Industrial Design Education at Parsons School of Design and RISD

The Bauhaus is popularly considered the fountainhead of industrial design education. This paper de-centers the myth of the Bauhaus within industrial design education in the United States by comparing the history of the founding and curricula at Rhode Island School of Design and Parsons School of Design. It will demonstrate that decades before the Bauhaus and its predecessors, American educators prepared designers to work with rapidly expanding manufacturing enterprises through a rigorous curriculum that had as aims both economic and social advancement. For most of the twentieth century, these two design schools experimented with different means and methods of industrial design education that had only a tangential relationship to the Bauhaus curriculum. A comparison of pedagogy, student and graduate work provides insight into particularly American characteristics of industrial design education.