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Bauhaus

The school whose teaching reduced form to the circle, the square and the triangle, tied colour to those shapes, and put craft and industry in the same room.

Bauhaus: Oskar Schlemmer's postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, lettering set inside a circle over rules and a triangle.
Schlemmer's postcard for the Bauhaus exhibition, 1923, Oskar Schlemmer.
Public domainPublic domain: Printed for the school's exhibition in 1923; Schlemmer died in 1943, more than seventy years ago, and the work is out of copyright everywhere; Commons tags the file public domain, and this house reads a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain print as carrying no new copyright.
Cropped to the upper half. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
Bauhaus: Schlemmer's painting of the Dessau school stair, figures reduced to volumes on the building's own geometry.
Bauhaustreppe, 1932, Oskar Schlemmer.
Public domainPublic domain: Painted in 1932; Schlemmer died in 1943, more than seventy years ago, and the painting is out of copyright everywhere; Commons tags the file public domain, and this house reads a faithful photograph of a flat public-domain painting as carrying no new copyright.
Cropped to the middle band. Retrieved 2026-09-10.

Near it

Swiss typographyGeometric sansAsymmetric typographyMemphisGrid

What it is made of

primitivescircle, square, triangle
colourthe three primaries, from Itten's and Kandinsky's teaching
typelowercase-only experiments, geometric construction, asymmetric layout

Where it came from

Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, closed under pressure in 1933. Its staff scattered and carried the teaching worldwide, which is most of why the influence is so wide.

Sources