Hasta La Ideas

As the Bauhaus celebrates its centennial this year, it seems there are more resources than ever to learn about the iconic school of design. If you can’t catch the Getty Center’s ongoing show, Bauhaus Beginnings, in person, the next best thing is this online companion exhibit just launched by the Getty Research Institute. Bauhaus: Building the New Artist is designed by yU+co and explores three seminal Bauhaus lessons through a series of fun, interactive exercises.

There are three modules—Form and Color, Matter and Materials, and Body and Spirit—which contain explanatory texts about each topic, its significance in design, and how they were taught at the school. Each module culminates with an exercise that lets you directly engage with the ideas you read about.

In Form and Color, a simple drag-and-drop game explores Wassily Kandinsky’s ideas about the relationship between primary shapes and primary colors. A series of video tutorials show how a single sheet of paper can become a dimensional sculpture through one of Josef Albers’ paper exercises in Matter and Materials. The final exercise brings Oskar Schlemmer’s dances to life in the Body and Spirit section by letting you customize the choreography, costumes, and music and generating an animation of the resulting performance.

Combining digital and hands-on activities, the result is a lighthearted and entertaining way to experience Bauhaus principles in action.

The online exhibition was conceived in conjunction with Bauhaus Beginnings, on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles through October 13.