The Legacy of Bauhaus.

The minimalist look that dominates your feed didn’t arrive with the latest app update. It’s been brewing for over a hundred years, inside a German art and design school that ran for barely more than a decade.

But what was the Bauhaus?

Founded in 1919 in Weimar by the architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was a German art and design school built on a radical idea: art, craft and technology all belonged together. At the time, design mostly meant decoration. Ornate flourishes, fussy detailing and ornament for the sake of ornament. The Bauhaus tore all of that up. It stripped design back to its essentials and asked one brilliant question of everything it made.

Does this actually work? That question changed the course of modern design.

Form follows function

If the Bauhaus had a battle cry, this was it. The phrase itself predates the school (American architect Louis Sullivan got there first) but the Bauhaus turned it into a way of life. The principle is simple. The look of a thing should come from what it’s for, not the other way round. A chair should be designed around sitting. A poster should be designed around being read. Strip away anything that doesn’t earn its place, and what’s left is honest, useful and quietly beautiful.

Sound familiar? It’s the same logic behind every clean interface and pared-back logo you see today.

Taught by industry professionals

The Bauhaus wasn’t just a building. It was a who’s who of twentieth-century creativity. Painters like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught alongside designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Josef and Anni Albers, and Marcel Breuer, whose tubular steel chairs you’ve almost certainly sat in a version of.

Students didn’t pick a single lane either. Everyone started with a foundation course covering colour, form and materials before specialising. (Spot the similarity to how we do things at Shillington, where you nail the fundamentals before going deep.)

The school moved from Weimar to a purpose-built campus in Dessau in 1925, then on to Berlin, picking up new directors and fresh ideas along the way.

Closed, but never finished

The Bauhaus only existed for fourteen years. In 1933 it was forced to close due to political pressure and as staff and students scattered across the world, they carried the Bauhaus philosophy with them. The ideas outlived the building by a century and counting.

The Bauhaus is all around you

• The clean sans-serif type in your favourite apps
• The minimalist logos that strip a brand back to one bold mark
• The intuitive UX and UI that makes an app feel effortless
• The furniture in your home, your office and pretty much every café you’ve ever sat in

A school that shut its doors in 1933 quietly helped design the world you live in now.

Design is everywhere.