One hundred years have passed since the founding of the Bauhaus, and things look quite different. Resources are not pinched by the prospect of war. Standardized production is not novel, but banal. Typographic communication has left the realm of the radical lowercase to that of the affected emoji. The masses for whom we design have gotten bigger and better, but perhaps also smaller and stranger. Nevertheless, the aura of the Bauhaus lives within our world always, a transparent underlay of lasting propositions. Today, we ask: what were these propositions and how have they made it this far? Where do the analog, economical ideas of the Bauhaus sit within our abundant, digital world?

Organized by four students from the Fall 2018 seminar “Bauhaus@100,” In Search of Space-Time was an immersive installation that presented viewers with an ode to the Bauhaus, a spin of the Vorkurs wheel inflected with the bush-hammered walls of Rudolph Hall and the hyperbole of digital media. It sought to present the process and products of a Bauhaus pedagogy applied in the twenty-first century and was intended not as a display of student works, but an archive of attempts to capture space-time, the synthetic apotheosis of the Bauhausler.

In a world where type and image have become our lingua franca, we turned to the Bauhaus on its centennial to celebrate and reinterpret its design lessons. We look back as we look forward, forever revolving in space-time suspension.

This exhibition was on view at the Yale School of Architecture’s North Gallery from October 10 to November 15, in concurrence with the Fall 2019 symposium “My Bauhaus: Transmedial Encounters.” A “transfiguration” spatial costume workshop was held on October 31.