Bauhaus at 100: As a Mode of Thinking, How It Shaped Modern Life (Part II) | QDaily Business History

You could also think of this as a "Bauhaus dictionary." This is Part II.

Ah, the non-bourgeois, rational, functionalist, collective, internationalist, industrialized, machine-driven, democratic, geometric, concrete, primary-colored, idealist, German, American, pure, austere, once hell-bent on sweeping everything clean — and later turned into a stylistic label that architects and arty types always like to name-drop — Bauhaus.

America's postwar money, Germany's chaotic self-reconstruction, and the internationalism that lingered after the First World War: all these forces collided to create that "ideal school of architecture and art" a hundred years ago.

Then the school fell into turmoil, relocated, and quickly dissolved. Its core figures scattered to the winds, and the lineage of modern design spread in far broader ways.

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius had always been interested in housing for ordinary people, and he brought his solution — high-rise apartment blocks for low-income residents — to America. In 1960, also in America, the Italian Massimo Vignelli and the American Ralph E. Eckerstrom both believed that European modern graphic design needed to engage more closely with American market logic; together they founded the design consultancy Unimark International, producing a body of work that was distinctly "American" — or "New York" — in character, including the New York City subway map and the Ford logo. The movement of people and capital transplanted "Bauhaus," giving it an even wider definition.

Whether out of nostalgia for utopian idealism, as a critique of American consumerism, or simply as a glance back at Soviet-style workers' collective housing, what we call "Bauhaus" has risen and fallen throughout a hundred years of daily life.

Bauhaus is not merely a style — it is more like a mode of thinking built in opposition, set against prior aesthetics and modes of production. Without understanding what came before, it is impossible to grasp the shock Bauhaus delivered to people a hundred years ago. Like "modernity" itself, it inspires both love and loathing. But whatever one thinks of it, it has profoundly shaped contemporary society.

Following our previous piece on its origins, we have collected 55 traces of Bauhaus in the world — as sprawling as everyday life itself, and so published in two parts. Part I has already run; this is Part II.

In our final installment, we will explore how Bauhaus shaped the city and the places we live.

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26. IKEA

In 1942, the seventeen-year-old Swede Feodor Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA, using a logo of yellow sans-serif lettering on a blue ground. Over the following decades, the company became known for furniture that was thoroughly contemporary in feel, practical, good-looking, and reasonably priced. Its founders called IKEA's approach "democratic design" — meaning the integration of manufacturing and design. The furniture is typically suited to a wide range of interior settings, and is often designed as simple flat-pack kits for customers to assemble themselves. Beyond that, the scope of "design" has been continuously expanded within IKEA; its SPACE10 lab works without any immediate commercial intent, designing food, housing, offices, and various processes in the service of better urban living.

27. Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

This campus holds the largest concentration of buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe.

In 1938, under pressure from Nazi Germany, Mies van der Rohe left Germany and fled to Chicago. He became director of the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology and immediately set about designing 20 buildings for the campus with great ambition. The results were entirely predictable: each building features a frame of steel and concrete and a glass curtain wall that reflects the sky. Glass facades were still quite novel at the time, and so even though students in the reading rooms were blinded by the glare, they dared not complain.

In 1944, the "New Bauhaus" that had been established in Chicago was incorporated into IIT's design school, making it the first school in America to offer a doctorate in design.

28. Invitation to the Rooftop Party Celebrating the Completion of the Dessau Bauhaus Building in 1926

In 1925, under political pressure, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to the central industrial city of Dessau. The following year, the Dessau Bauhaus building designed by Gropius was completed — it would go on to become the school's landmark structure and marked the institution's official establishment in Dessau. In March 1926, with the main building essentially finished, a party was held on the rooftop.

Every guest received an invitation designed by Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus student at the time. Large and small circles, elongated rectangles, and a sans-serif typeface entirely free of ornament were the invitation's main elements. Symmetry had apparently lost its importance: the text on the left runs vertically, and all the words indicating time and place are in lowercase. The red circle in the lower right is prominent; besides red, blue and black are also featured — though it is unclear what the printing quality was like at the time, perhaps only red and black were actually visible.

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29. Kandem Table Lamp

Between 1928 and 1932, the Bauhaus redesigned Marianne Brandt's Kandem table lamp for the Kandem company. The lamp featured a cast-iron base that was easy to replicate and well suited to industrial production; it was compact, clean, inexpensive, and could be placed on a bedside table, which made it very popular.

Later, the student Heinrich Siegfried Bormann modified the heavy iron block of the base into a light ring of slender tubing — reducing the amount of material, bringing more visual playfulness to the color, and, when mounted on a wall, producing an effect not unlike the snake in the classic video game.

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30. Le Corbusier's LC3 Sofa

On January 27, 2010, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the company's first iPad. At the launch event, he sat in a simple-looking black sofa: a metal frame supporting generous pads of thick soft leather on every face.

The sofa looked like a plush cube caged in a steel frame — when someone sat in it, the leather cushions yielded just enough to look comfortable. This sofa originated with Le Corbusier's "Grand Confort" series, designed in 1929; alongside the "LC3" (named after his initials), the series also included the LC1 and LC2 in other sizes. In the 1920s, most conventional sofas and chairs used wooden frames with cushions applied on top. The LC3's decision to leave the steel frame exposed — and to simply rest the large, supremely comfortable cushions on top to fill the space — was a radical move.

31. The Louvre Pyramid Entrance

In 1989, the renovation of the Cour Napoléon — the main courtyard of the Louvre in Paris — was completed. Chinese American architect I. M. Pei had designed a glass pyramid with a metal frame as the new entrance, channeling the flow of visitors into the museum. The pyramid's metal supports consist of interconnected rectangles, both strong and elegant. The glass surface allows the structure to reflect the changing sky; its transparency also floods the hall below with natural light, turning it into a sun-filled atrium — and passersby in the plaza find their sightlines unobstructed by the building.

The proposal was controversial from the moment it was announced. Opponents argued that such a modern structure was incompatible with the Louvre's historic fabric. But I. M. Pei argued that "because it is built of glass and steel, it means that the old building traditions have been broken. It is architecture of our time."

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32. The "Meditation Space" at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris

In 1995, the "Meditation Space" designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris was completed. That same year Ando was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize; the citation noted that "he works with concrete as smooth as silk and structures space with walls — which he defines as the most fundamental and the richest element of architecture."

The Meditation Space is no exception: it is a cylindrical concrete structure with an opening, built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the UNESCO Constitution and to symbolize peace. Within its characteristic simplicity, Ando used granite from Hiroshima — purified after exposure to nuclear radiation — as the building's floor, reminding visitors to take the lessons of war to heart.

33. Mask Portrait No. 13 (Mask Portrait by Gertrud Arndt)

In 1926, Bauhaus student Gertrud Arndt purchased her first camera. "Out of boredom," she retreated to the darkroom and photographed herself in more than 40 self-portraits. For each one she dressed up in different disguises — a beard, tin-framed spectacles — producing images that seemed to depict a character she was playing, yet somehow also unmistakably herself. These mask photographs were private at first, but they went on to become some of the most celebrated photographs ever made at the Bauhaus. Gertrud Arndt is considered a pioneer of women's self-portraiture; her work resonates with that of Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle.

34. MT 8 Table Lamp

German silversmith Wilhelm Wagenfeld enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1923, and that same year co-designed with his classmate Carl Jakob Jucker a table lamp featuring a milky-white spherical shade and a metal (or glass) base.

The lamp's form was clean and spare, with not a trace of ornament; the pull-switch was precision-machined metal, connected at the spherical top — entirely unlike the fussy, overwrought classicist lamps of the era. And unlike purely hand-crafted objects, its components were manufactured by local suppliers and assembled on site, making it far less labor-intensive. Wagenfeld could hardly have anticipated that a student project would become the most famous "Bauhaus lamp" in the history of modern design — one that today sells for as much as $995 a piece.

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35. The New York City Subway Visual Identity

In 1966, the entire visual signage system of the New York City subway was overhauled — station name signs, the maps distributed at information booths and hung on walls, and the color codes for each line. The subway system had taken its complete shape around 1940, but the signage inside the stations was a patchwork: late-19th-century classical ornament coexisted with mosaic tile work later designed by Squire J. Vickers.

The new visual identity was the work of Unimark International. The typefaces used throughout the system — Standard Medium, a sans-serif, and Helvetica — were all sans-serif fonts, celebrated for their clarity and simplicity. Station name signs used white text on black; line designations were enclosed in circles rendered in primary colors. Type sizes and sign formats came in three varieties to distinguish the three separate subway systems. The subway map was as spare as the in-station signage: route intersections were rendered at only 45- or 90-degree angles; each line was assigned a single primary color; and the transit lines were overlaid on a simplified, grid-divided map of New York City.

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36. Olympic Sport Pictograms

The simple human-figure icons assigned to each Olympic event originated at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

The black pictograms followed a grid-based design system that kept lines clean and precise and standardized the angles at which athletes' limbs were depicted — the overall size of each icon could be measured in grid squares. Related icons also appearing for the first time at those Games were the small figures indicating men's and women's restrooms.

Before that, the Olympics had never been held in Asia, and the language barrier appeared to be a particular concern that year. With these pictograms, visitors from any country could immediately tell what event was being contested or which restroom they were approaching, without squinting at the English, French, or other language translations beneath the Japanese. From then on, each Olympic host country has generally designed its own set of pictograms in a national style.

37. OXO Kitchen Tools

A more affordable and accessible example of functionalist design. Founded in the United States in 1990, the kitchenware brand OXO spans an exceptionally wide range — from cooking and cleaning to baby products, bathroom accessories, bar tools, and office supplies. Its materials extend beyond metal to nylon, stainless steel, beech wood, glass, and corrosion-resistant aluminized steel. Founder Sam Farber wanted to create comfortable, easy-to-hold "Good Grips."

To most people today this probably seems unremarkable — supermarkets are now full of cheap imitations. "Quality kitchenware" has become fashionable; those silver implements marked "Made in Germany," for instance, use that label to signal high quality and precision.

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38. The French Comedy Film Playtime

In the 1967 French film Playtime, the comedian Jacques Tati loses his way among towering glass office buildings full of right angles, able to see his destination but never quite find the entrance. At dusk, all the glass apartment buildings throw the quirks of their residents into reflection. The director's intention was to satirize these glass high-rises — rational, monumental, and inhuman — that had become fashionable in the early 1960s.

In Tati's earlier 1953 film, Mon Oncle, which he also directed and starred in, the main character moves into an extremely modern geometric house where every object is impractical and non-functional — chairs that are impossible to sit in comfortably, hard and ugly. That film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

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39. The Rose Center for Earth and Space

This planetarium wing of the American Museum of Natural History was completed in 2000 at a cost of $210 million. It is a spectacular example of the new glass-box spectacle: a six-story-high glass curtain wall encases a cubic volume containing a sphere with an outer diameter of 27 meters, appearing to float in mid-air — though in fact supported by a truss structure. Such a design is hard to describe as "simple."

40. Robert Taylor Homes

In 1962, Robert Taylor Homes — 28 high-rise towers capable of housing 11,000 people — officially opened. Located in Bronzeville, a historically African American neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, the complex was part of the federal urban-renewal program aimed at eliminating slums.

By 1965, 27,000 people had moved in. Residents could open their doors onto ventilation corridors and chat with neighbors; the lobbies featured speaker-equipped phone booths. These features might have made it seem like a modern ideal for working-class families.

The irony is that by the 1970s — whether by accident or by the logic of its design — Robert Taylor Homes had become a gathering place for the poor and for gangs. Gang violence and drug dealing were constant; stairwells filled with addicts and human waste; gunfights broke out regularly. This eventually led the city to decide to demolish it and replace it with mixed-use low-rise buildings. In 2005, a bulldozer knocked down the last remaining structure.

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41. The Seagram Building

This 158-meter, 38-story skyscraper in the heart of New York City was built between 1954 and 1958, designed by architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. It is a vertical rectangular prism; apart from the ground floor and roof, the building's curtain wall rises straight and unvaried. Amber-colored glass is the dominant element, accounting for 75% of the exterior, paired with an orderly grid of bronze window mullions. Tall, rigorous, even cold — these define the building's character. As 1960s policy shifts combined with technological innovation and a global surge in super-wealthy clients, skyscrapers began to rise in ever-greater numbers across New York.

42. Vidal Sassoon's Geometric Haircuts

Britain in the late 1950s was in the midst of transformation — a new rock youth culture, the women's liberation movement, and the rise of new fashion. Style icon Mary Quant led the miniskirt revolution, and young people were hungry for a more modern look.

Vidal Sassoon caught the signal. In 1961, on a trip to Chicago and New York — both cities dense with Bauhaus architecture — Sassoon was drawn to the geometric forms of the urban built environment. He drew comparisons between architecture and the contours of the human face, imagining hair rendered in geometric shapes. He argued that hair was itself a material, and that its inherent structure could be used to create a form that would hold its shape whether the hair moved freely or was freshly washed. If the transformation worked, clients would be able to recreate the style at home.

In 1963, Sassoon designed a haircut for model Grace Coddington based on sharp lines and geometric appearance — a cut that would come to be known as the "iconic five-point." The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Sassoon's geometric cuts were a game changer — he liberated women from their beehives and bouffants, bringing visible freedom and sexiness."

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43. Tea Infuser by Marianne Brandt

In 1924, the German designer Marianne Brandt hand-crafted a metal teapot that stripped away all decorative elements, retaining only a pure geometric functional form — it would later be recognized as a canonical example of industrial design.

Its silver hemispherical body was simple in shape, supported by a crossbar structure; every component — lid, handle, spout, and base — was clearly defined and self-contained. The D-shaped heat-resistant ebony handle sat high, making it easy to pour. Unlike conventional teapots of the time, this design was intended to brew a concentrated tea infusion, with a filter inside. In 2007, one of the surviving examples was sold at Sotheby's in New York for $361,000 — one of only seven known to exist today.

44. The "Teardrop" Pencil Sharpener and Raymond Loewy

In 1933, American industrial designer Raymond Loewy designed a streamlined pencil sharpener called the "Teardrop" — it looked somewhat like a bullet. To use it, one inserted a pencil into the hole and turned a crank at the back; the shavings fell into a receptacle below, which needed to be removed for cleaning. The sharpener could therefore sit on — or even be mounted to — a desk, rather than being tucked away in a drawer as before. When you turned the crank, the mechanical workings seemed amplified within this small tool.

Loewy was the most celebrated American industrial designer of the twentieth century. His works include the Shell logo, the Greyhound Lines bus, and the streamlined Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 locomotive — a symbol of speed in the 1930s.

45. Geometric Striped Textile Wall Hanging (Textile by Anni Albers)

This wall hanging was created in 1926 by textile artist Anni Albers using triple-weave technique. The pattern reflects an abstract design based on color relationships; the repeating and interlocking geometry and stripes represent an early prototype for large-scale industrial production. Albers noticed that ancient textiles showed little structural variation; she chose to foreground modern materials, using synthetic fibers and rayon. It is one of the earliest woven pieces to incorporate synthetic fibers — materials that would gradually become standard in textiles thereafter.

46. The Architecture Department of Tongji University

In 1942, the architecture department of St. John's University in Shanghai was established. Its founder, Huang Zuoshen, had graduated from Harvard University and was Gropius's first Chinese student. In 1951, St. John's University was dissolved and the architecture department merged into Tongji University.

In 1953, the Wenyuan Building at Tongji University's architecture department was completed, embodying Bauhaus principles of modern design: its floor plan was organized according to functional requirements, and the entrance portico on the building's facade was asymmetrical.

47. 1964 Tokyo Olympics Poster

Three Olympic posters designed by Japanese graphic designer Kamekura Yusaku for the Tokyo Olympics are particularly representative. One is the emblem for those Games: its central element is a red circle — readable as the sun in the Japanese flag — with the Olympic rings and "TOKYO 1964" rendered in a single yellow sans-serif typeface below, providing a clean contrast with the red. The other two posters use photographs of athletes — one sprinting at the starting line, one in butterfly stroke; using photography for an Olympic poster was a novelty at the time.

48. TWA Flight Center, Kennedy Airport (Terminal 5)

Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen designed Terminal 5 at New York's JFK Airport in 1956. The entire building was conceived to express the sensation of flight: the main structure consists of a reinforced-concrete shell with four wing-like extensions spreading outward from the center — modeled on a bird with outstretched wings.

The interior of the terminal continues the smooth, flowing curves of the roof; the glass curtain wall beneath the roof is supported by a steel structure and tilted at an angle, intended to give passengers waiting in the departure hall the feeling of looking out of an airplane window. Saarinen died a year before construction was completed, and the building's progress was affected. Although it became a New York landmark, it was ultimately not in use for long.

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49. Unimark International

In 1960, the twenty-nine-year-old Italian Massimo Vignelli finished his architecture studies in Italy and moved to New York. There he was reunited with Ralph Eckerstrom — someone he had met during an earlier study visit to America — who was then teaching at the design school of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Both men saw a business opportunity: European modern graphic design and American market logic had yet to find the right fit. Both also believed in standardized, systematic design as a medium for efficient, rational mass communication.

The design consultancy called "Unimark" was founded by the two of them and four other designers. Although it survived only until 1977, during those years it was the largest design firm in the world — and counterfeit companies using the Unimark name can still be found today. The firm rigorously enforced "standards" and "systems": sans-serif type and grid-based layout were used pervasively. In 1967, Unimark designed the logo for American Airlines — two sans-serif uppercase "A"s, one red and one blue, flanking a blue eagle with outstretched, ruler-straight wings, the bird's form readable from a distance as a pair of stylized letters.

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50. The Wassily Chair

In 1925, Marcel Breuer — then a Hungarian student at the Bauhaus — bought a bicycle and found himself noticing the steel-tube construction: light, simple, with great strength at the curved handlebars.

Steel seamless tubing was just then being developed in Germany, and Breuer decided to try making a lighter chair from it — his habitual material until then had been wood. He took a well-padded salon armchair known for its comfort, stripped its structure down to its bare essentials, and arrived at a frame of bent steel tubing with canvas panels suspended within it for the back, seat, and armrests.

The chair quickly caught the eye of German furniture maker Thonet, who also produced a foldable version; "lightweight" and "folds into a box" became the chair's defining qualities. After the Second World War, another furniture company took over production and named it "Wassily" — because they had heard that Breuer's teacher Wassily Kandinsky had greatly admired it.

51. The Logo of Taiwan's Wei Chuan Foods

For 13 years before 1967, the logo of Taiwan's Wei Chuan Foods Corporation had been a pair of elaborate, traditional phoenixes. In 1967, when the company adopted a corporate identity system (CIS), they commissioned Japanese designer Ōchi Hiroshi to redesign the logo — much as the industrial designer Koike Shinji, then very popular in Taiwan, had done in his lectures. The new logo was five circles stacked in a "W" formation, symbolizing "the full complement of five flavors," with red and white as the primary colors.

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52. The Central Academy of Arts and Crafts

Now the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University, the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts was established in 1956, along with a Central Academy of Arts and Crafts Research Institute, with the explicit mandate of integrating science and art. The school's vice president at the time, Pang Xunqin, had studied in France and inspected arts, crafts, and design in Berlin; he aspired to create a "Chinese Bauhaus."

53. The Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong

Located at 1 Garden Road, Central, Hong Kong Island, the Bank of China Tower is the headquarters of Bank of China (Hong Kong). When it officially opened in 1990, it was the tallest skyscraper in Asia. Designed by Chinese American architect I. M. Pei, the building stands 70 stories and 315 meters tall, its concrete columns supporting a glass curtain wall exterior. The building's form is prismatic, modeled on a bamboo shoot growing taller section by section — symbolizing strength and ambition.

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54. Beijing 798 Art Zone

Inside the 798 Art Zone in Jiuxianqiao, Chaoyang District, Beijing, the "Timezone 8" space has a sawtooth exterior with a sail-shaped roof. The horizontal skylights in the roof face north and are tilted outward at a certain angle, allowing the interior to make use of both natural and reflected light simultaneously; they are also sturdy and practical, with an earthquake resistance rating above magnitude 8. Along with the rest of 798's buildings — functional, unornamented, clean-lined — this structure was identified by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as "architecture in the Bauhaus style."

These buildings were, in fact, designed in 1957 by architects from what was then East Germany. The 798 factory was originally part of the "718 Joint Factory," a radio and electronics-components enterprise that was one of the largest companies in China's first Five-Year Plan and the largest project built by the German Democratic Republic in China. What is now "Timezone 8" was the workshop that once produced white ceramic components. In September 1995, the Central Academy of Fine Arts relocated from its nearby campus on Xiaowei Hutong and leased space at Wanhong West Street, Jiuxianqiao (the Beijing Semiconductor Device Factory No. 2). The "798" complex nearby was rented as a studio by the Academy's sculpture department — and from that point, 798 became associated with art.

55. The 9093 Kettle

In 1985, American architect Michael Graves designed a moderately priced stainless-steel 9093 kettle for the Italian brand Alessi. Its distinctive feature is a small red bird-shaped whistle at the tip of the spout. Design writer William Smock praised it in his book: "It bridges the gap between postmodern whimsy and modernist seriousness, honoring both. On top of its modernist essence — geometric body, industrial materials — it adds a touch of playful fancy." In 2015, to mark the design's thirtieth anniversary, Graves introduced a special edition replacing the bird whistle with a dragon. Disney produced its own version as well.

The banner and header image are from Jacques Tati's film Playtime; image from Douban Movies.