Bauhaus: Art as Life – in pictures

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius. In 1925 the school moved to Dessau, between Berlin and Leipzig, where the famous Bauhaus building, designed by Gropius, was built in just one year Photograph: Christin Irrgang

‘With its glass curtain walls and spare rectilinear forms, it crystallised what would become the dominant type of modernist architecture,’ writes the Observer's architecture critic Rowan Moore Photograph: Tadashi Okochi

‘It was one of the most prodigiously influential buildings of all time, a prototype that would be followed by office buildings, hotels, schools and hospitals in almost any country you can think of.’ Photograph: Tadashi Okochi

The building has recently been fully restored. ‘To visit the Bauhaus building now is to be struck again by the extraordinary way in which a single construction in a provincial town could have had so much effect,’ writes Moore Photograph: Yvonne Tenschert

Reception area and hall. ‘If [the building] looked like a factory it also had properties of a commune, a cult centre and a theatre’ Photograph: Christoph Petras

‘One of the key spaces was an auditorium whose stage is connected to the communal canteen, thereby bringing together performance and life’ Photograph: Christoph Petras

‘Its stairs, workshops and balconies were places of display as well as function, and its glass walls made a spectacle of its internal activities. It also has a subtle colour scheme, contrary to assertions that the Bauhaus was only interested in black, white and grey.’ Photograph: Christoph Petras

Farkas Molnár's Entwurf für ein Einfamilienhaus, 1922 – part of the Barbican's forthcoming Bauhaus: Art as Life exhibition, running from 3 May to 12 August Photograph: PR

Factory A by Josef Albers, 1925-26 Photograph: Tim Nighswander

Set of four stacking tables by Josef Albers, c.1927 Photograph: PR

Prospectus '14 Bauhausbücher' by László Moholy-Nagy, 1928 Photograph: PR

Kathedrale by Lyonel Feininger, 1919 Photograph: PR

Eugen Batz's The spatial effect of colours and forms, from Wassily Kandinsky's course at the Bauhaus Dessau, 1929 Photograph: PR

Tomb in Three Parts by Paul Klee, 1923 Photograph: PR