Bauhaus, Deconstructing a Prestigious Name  

An interesting article on Bauhaus and branding and legal issues:
from New York times (Via Clarin)
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
When a friend from Manchester landed in Berlin with time to spare before a meeting, he asked a taxi driver to take him to the Bauhaus museum. Instead of being deposited outside the Bauhaus Archive, which is dedicated to the early 20th-century German art and design school, my friend was astonished when the taxi stopped at an enormous D.I.Y. superstore.
Perhaps his request was lost in translation, but the driver had mistaken the name of the archive for that of the Bauhaus retail group. The error was understandable, because hundreds of organizations have chosen the name Bauhaus: from a Hong Kong furniture store and a solar energy conference in Frankfurt, to a Madrid investment bank and a hostel in the Belgian city of Bruges. There is also the Bauhaus University in Weimar, the city where the school originated, and one of the first gothic rock groups was dubbed Bauhaus.
Every so often, there have been legal ructions over the name. The biggest battle was in 1972 when the Bauhaus Archive tried to force the retail giant to drop the name, but failed. A new argument has erupted over the latter's recent efforts to compel "My Bauhaus is better than yours," a small Berlin company selling conceptual work by young designers, to change its name. Its legal assault succeeded, but has triggered a feisty debate over the ownership of one of the most important names in design history.
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Numerous companies have christened themselves Bauhaus over the years, the most prominent being the retail group, which began with one store in 1960 and now owns 190 stores across Europe selling furniture and garden products as well as hardware. It trademarked the name during the 1960s and has taken legal action to protect it. Even so, it is puzzling as to why it targeted the tiny My Bauhaus, which has three employees and whose choice of name was clearly ironic, when there are so many bigger businesses called Bauhaus.
Set up by a bunch of design students from Bauhaus University in 2009, My Bauhaus, now called New Tendency, holds exhibitions of conceptual design and sells small editions of furniture and objects. "When we received the first legal letter last spring, we believed it was a joke," said Manuel Goller, one of its co-founder. "But a second letter arrived in the autumn. We couldn't afford a lawsuit, so we have changed our name. How is it possible that a hardware store controls the name of the most important art and design movement of the 20th century"?
Similar questions are being posed by the German media and by design historians concerned that young Europeans will grow up associating Bauhaus with D.I.Y. superstores, not with a visionary design school. Judging by the number of calls to the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau requesting advice on home repair, some people already do.

Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/arts/14iht-design14.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0