100 Years of Bauhaus

"The Code" is the first part of Bauhaus WORLD. The search for the secret of Bauhaus’s enduring success leads all the way to Japan - a journey illustrating how the forced closure of the school that drove the movement into exile served to spread its philosophy around the world.

The three-part documentary Bauhaus WORLD marks the 100th anniversary of the opening of Germany’s best-known art, architecture and design school, the Bauhaus. Exploring the legacy of this iconic German institution, our film crew travelled the world, meeting architects, artists, urban planners, doers and dreamers. Do the Bauhaus’s social ideals and design principles still shape how we live today?

New approaches to education and training, architecture, painting, dance and design were explored and developed at the Bauhaus. Its founder and director Walter Gropius attracted the leading creative figures of the era, including Hannes Meyer, Mies van der Rohe, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Anni Albers, Josef Albers and Gunta Stölzl. Today, Bauhaus is considered the birthplace of Modernism and has become a byword for sleek, functional design.  

Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus school moved to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin, where it was forced to shut in 1933 after Hitler seized power. Most of its artists, architects and visionaries emigrated, fanning out and spreading the Bauhaus doctrine around the world.

Filmmaker Lydia Ranke and her team travelled the world to make the three-part documentary Bauhaus WORLD. Alongside the Bauhaus sites of Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, they visited cities such as Tokyo, Amman, Tel Aviv, New York, Chicago, Mexico City and Medellín, talking to experts from architects Norman Foster and Tatiana Bilbao to architecture critic Mark Wigley, furniture designer Yinka Ilori and fashion designer Kasia Kucharska.