This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

You can picture her there,

lying on her stomach in the dirt,

arcing her camera up towards the building,

tilting the frame so that the stark rectilinear building

transforms into a striking asymmetric composition.

You can see her taking her time with this photo, adjusting the focus and the exposure.

She releases the shutter, impressing the negative image onto a glass plate.

90 years later, this photograph by Lucia Maholy is one of the most famous

images of the German art school known as the Bauhaus. Bau, meaning the word build in German, and Houghs meaning house.

Medioker German speaker Sam Greenspan.

The Boughhouse was founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919.

The school sought to fuse art with industrialization, to use new ideals of modernism

to create beautiful, functional things, which could be mass-produced for the betterment of society.

In the beginning of the Bauhaus rose from the ashes of World War I

and there was a very hopeful, very utopian period of craftsmen and artists all creating together.

This is Robin Scholdenfry.

I teach architectural and design history at the Courthold Institute of Art in London,

but I'm American.

The Bauhaus was a magnet for European designers, architects, and artists of all kinds in the early 20th

century, many of whom would go on to achieve international acclaim.

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