I Love the Bauhaus and German Modernism

I also love that cultural school of design and architecture.
May be one point to explore for your essay, a less focused one, is in which period of world history and cultural thought it inserted.
And how this may had an influence in it with, of course, specific responses.
It was a time shaked by big changes. From Relativity in Physics to the increasing difussion of Psychology.
Big debates in the philosophical field.
Also the conceptual sides of Math and Logic were being shaked and debated.
The relatively new Russian revolution, the growing thrends to fascism and nazism.
Functionality as also Aestetics is indirectly related to what was happening in politics, economy, the rest of culture and Science.
Gropius himself wrote a pair of books, small treatises in fact, about the philosophical aspects of it.