In late 1932, students and one of the world’s most famous architects painted the brick walls of an abandoned Berlin factory white, paying for the paint themselves, trying to keep a design school alive. Ten months later the Gestapo padlocked the doors. This episode tells the biography of the Bauhaus as if it were a living institution: its 1919 founding by Walter Gropius in a devastated post-war Weimar, its warring directors, and how its forced closure scattered its ideas across the globe.

We explore Johannes Itten’s mystical preliminary course with its breathing exercises and vegetarian diet, Gropius’s 1923 pivot to art and technology as a new unity, the move to Dessau and its famous glass curtain wall building, Hannes Meyer’s profitable but politically dangerous functionalism, and Mies van der Rohe’s final attempt to depoliticize the school. The story ends with the diaspora that carried Bauhaus thinking to Harvard, Chicago, and the White City of Tel Aviv.

• Why the name Bauhaus refers to medieval stonemasons’ guilds and what that meant for Gropius’s vision
• How Marcel Breuer’s bicycle handlebars inspired the tubular steel chair
• The 50 percent funding cut in Weimar that pushed the school to announce its own closure and move to Dessau
• Why the Nazi regime saw flat roofs, glass, and steel as un-German even after the school stripped out politics
• How over 4,000 Bauhaus-style buildings in Tel Aviv adapted the principles to a Mediterranean climate