Germany in 1919 had just lost the war and signed the Treaty of Versailles; the whole country lay in ruins. The architect Walter Gropius took over a small art school in Weimar and renamed it the Bauhaus — German for ‘house of building.’

His idea was radical for the time: put artists and craftsmen in the same building, teach the painters to make furniture and the carpenters to compose. Every design began from the three primaries — red, blue, yellow — plus circle / square / triangle, the entrance test Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten set their students.

The Bauhaus lasted only 14 years — closed by the Nazis in 1933. But its exiled teachers and students carried the ideas to IIT, Black Mountain College and the New Bauhaus in Chicago — directly producing the whole of modernist design education. From the Helvetica typeface to IKEA flat-pack furniture, from the iPhone icon grid to the page you’re reading — all of it owes the Bauhaus a credit.