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| Ikea Gunde folding chair Photo: IKEA It was part of the Bauhaus philosophy that modern design should harness industrial techniques to make products accessible to everyone. The Ikea Gunde folding chair does just that. Its construction also has distant echoes of the tubular steel furniture that was among Bauhaus’s most famous creations, although with less finesse than the originals. |
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| The iPhone Photo: Kiichiro Sato/AP Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, has an acknowledged debt to Dieter Rams, designer of many classic products for Braun electronics, and Rams has an acknowledged debt to the Bauhaus. The clean lines, rounded corners, minimalist elegance and geometric simplicity of an iPhone, together with intelligent use of new materials and technology, all therefore go back to ideas conceived in 1920s Germany. |
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| Signs in airports Photo: Alamy The Bauhaus’s influence on typography and graphics was vast, transforming, for example, the advertising and branding of postwar corporate America. One of its most pervasive effects is in the signs that guide us around unfamiliar places like airports: the best of them use clear sans serif fonts, symbols that are graphically simplified but still informative and an underlying geometric order. All descend fromthe Bauhaus, usually by way of the influential Ulm School of Design, which was founded on Bauhaus lines in 1953. |
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| The fitted kitchen Photo: Alizada Studios/Alamy In the Haus am Horn, completed in Weimar in 1923, the architecture, interiors and furniture were designed by several of the school’s faculty and students. Among them was Benita Otte, whose kitchen’s principles have become universal: integrated design, flush worktops, functional layout. While there are other legitimate claimants to the ancestry of the modern kitchen, this was first. |
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| The Shard Photo: Tony C French/Getty Images Almost any glass-clad building owes something to the Bauhaus and to the building that Walter Gropius designed to house it in Dessau. The Shard is one of many thousands. Intentionally or not, its crystalline shape goes back to the very early days of the school, before it became uniformly straight-lined and rational. |
Source: Bauhaus at 100: its legacy in five key designs
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