Bauhaus

Weimar → Dessau → Berlin, 1919–1933. 43 archive entries (Substrate collection: bauhaus).

Palette

Unmixed primaries only — no gradients, no tints, no secondary mixing: #ff0000 red · #ffff00 yellow · #0000ff blue · #000000 black · #ffffff white

The archive's own tagged posters/projects skew toward books, catalogs, and later tributes rather than period primary sources, so their extracted palette is mostly neutral grays — the five colors above come from the canon's own Bauhaus movement entry and are the real, citable Bauhaus palette. Don't let a generation drift toward pastels or tints — the whole point is that these are unmixed.

Type

Geometric sans only. Herbert Bayer's Universal alphabet went further than most and proposed abolishing capitals entirely — "a historical accident." Prefer all-lowercase or all-caps; never mix case within one wordmark. No serifs, no scripts, no decoration in the letterform itself.

Composition

Circle, square, triangle as literal, irreducible building blocks — not abstracted, actually drawn as the shapes. Centered or strict-grid arrangements more often than the asymmetric tension you'd get from Swiss design a generation later (see swiss-style.md for the contrast). Photomontage and photogram experiments where photography appears. Furniture and object design read as cantilevered steel geometry — function expressed as visible structure, not hidden behind ornament.

Motifs & materials

Circle/square/triangle marks used as literal design elements (not just a grid discipline). Primary-color blocking as fields, not accents. Steel tube + cane furniture. Sans-serif wordmarks, frequently lowercase-only.

Mood

Minimalist, austere, academic, utopian, rigorous, experimental, principled.

Reference points

• Bauhaus — the canon's own movement entry: "form follows function, but function is broader than utility — it includes spiritual need"
• Ulm HfG — direct 1953 successor, systematized Bauhaus rigor into design-as-ethics after the war
• Black Mountain College — Albers' American continuation after the school's 1933 closure
• Memphis Group — the explicit 1981 reaction against it, useful as a photographic negative: everything Bauhaus refuses (clashing color, mood-over-function, deliberate bad taste), Memphis embraces

Archive texture

Skews toward project (12) and poster (7) over pure graphic ephemera — schools, typefaces, and publications are as well-represented as posters. This is a pedagogy and an ideology as much as a look; treat "does this serve mass production, not the collector" as a real constraint, not just an aesthetic preference.