In 1917 the Netherlands had just kept its neutrality through the First World War. Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and a circle of idealists founded a magazine called De Stijl (‘The Style’) — they believed the post-war world needed a brand-new, universal, ‘absolute’ beauty.

The method was to delete everything representational: a tree pruned until it no longer looked like a tree, until only horizontal and vertical lines remained. Colour was cut to three primaries (red, yellow, blue) plus three non-colours (black, white, grey). They believed this was the essence of the universe — you can see the rule in Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair, the Schröder House, even YSL’s 1965 Mondrian dress.

Two years later Walter Gropius carried these ideas straight into the Bauhaus, and from there into Apple Park, the Notion interface, and the CSS Grid of the page you’re reading now. Every ‘aligned set of boxes’ is a descendant of De Stijl.