Bauhaus mood board

Primary forms, primary colorCircle, triangle, square. Red, yellow, blue. Everything else is built from these.

Signal red

#D93A2B

Chrome yellow

#F4B81B

Ultramarine

#1E4FA0

Ink black

#161616

Paper grey

#EDEAE2

The paletteThree saturated primaries plus black and a neutral ground. No gradients, no tints.

form follows function

An idea older than the school, but the one it lived by. Shape comes from purpose.

Kandinsky’s questionnaireYellow triangle, red square, blue circle: the pairing he proposed in 1923.

Glass and gridCurtain-wall facades, flat roofs, windows as a rhythm instead of decoration.

ag

abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz

Lowercase onlyHerbert Bayer’s universal alphabet (1925) dropped capitals. Geometric sans, tight tracking, heavy weights.

Tubular steelBreuer’s club chair: bent pipe and stretched bands, a bicycle handlebar turned into furniture.

less is more

Mies van der Rohe, the school’s last director.

Abstract compositionDiagonals, overlapping discs and a few precise lines. Balance without symmetry.

Aa 48display / 800

Heading 28heading / 700

Body copy at 16 on a 1.4 line height.body / 400

Spacing: 8 / 16 / 24 / 32 / 48 / 64. Corners: 0. Borders: 2px black. Shadows: none.

The system in tokensOne typeface, a strict scale, an 8-point spacing rhythm, hard edges and flat color.

Pure geometry in metalA hemisphere, a cylinder, a ring. Marianne Brandt’s teapot is all three.

Core principlesSeven rules that repeat across architecture, objects and print.

Typographic posterDiagonal axis, heavy sans, bars as rules. The 1923 exhibition set the look for modern print.

Woven gridsAnni Albers and the weaving workshop treated cloth as color and structure.

steel

glass

plywood

concrete

Material honestySteel, glass, bent wood and concrete, left unpainted and unornamented.

No back legsThe cantilever chair: one bent tube, springy and light, made possible by steel.

Grid and asymmetryA modular grid with unequal blocks. Weight is balanced, not mirrored.

PhotomontageMoholy-Nagy and Bayer layered photography, dots and geometry into new images.

The Wagenfeld lampGlass globe, glass stem, metal foot. Every part is a basic solid.

Pattern as systemThree shapes, three colors, one repeat. Wallpaper and textile prints used the same logic.

14

years, three cities, one school that changed how everything is made.