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49 free Bauhaus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Bauhaus trivia quiz covers the school that shaped modern design, from Walter Gropius's founding manifesto in Weimar in 1919 to the faculty's decision to close the Berlin school in 1933. There are questions on the three cities and three directors, on Johannes Itten's preliminary course, on the painters who taught there (Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, Schlemmer), on Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel chairs, Marianne Brandt's metalwork, Herbert Bayer's lowercase typography and Anni Albers's weaving. It also follows what came next: Mies van der Rohe and Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, Gropius and Breuer at Harvard, Black Mountain College, Tel Aviv's White City, the UNESCO listings, and, because it is what half of Google means by the word, the Northampton goth band that called itself Bauhaus 1919. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has taken an art history class, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who know which product made the school the most money. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and the histories it cites, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919?
Walter Gropius
His neologism referenced both building and the Bauhütte, the medieval stonemasons' guild.
Q 02The word Bauhaus translates literally from German as what?
Building house
The school's manifesto declared that the aim of all creative activity was the building, though it offered no architecture classes until 1927.
Q 03The Bauhaus operated in three German cities. In what order?
Weimar, Dessau, Berlin
Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau to 1932, and ten months in a derelict Berlin factory before the end.
Q 04Who was the third and final director of the Bauhaus, from 1930 to 1933?
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
He interviewed every student on arrival, dismissed those he judged uncommitted and stopped the school making goods for sale.
Q 05Why was second director Hannes Meyer dismissed by the mayor of Dessau in 1930?
Alleged misuse of school funds for communist causes
Meyer had actually blocked a student communist cell, but his politics still made the school a target; some loyal students left for the Soviet Union.
Q 06Who finally closed the Bauhaus in 1933?
Its own leadership, under Nazi pressure
The Gestapo had shut the Berlin school and then agreed to let it reopen, but Mies and the faculty chose to close it voluntarily.
Q 07Which city has the highest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world?
Tel Aviv
More than 4,000 buildings in the White City were put up by German Jewish émigré architects from the 1930s; UNESCO listed it in 2003.
Q 08Which revenue-earning workshop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau?
Pottery
The changes of city and director kept shifting the school's focus, technique and politics.
Q 09Which 19th-century English designer's ideas about art serving society influenced the early Bauhaus?
William Morris
Gropius's 1919 pamphlet, calling for a new guild of craftsmen without class distinctions, was written under Morris's spell.
Q 10Which Belgian Art Nouveau architect ran the Weimar arts and crafts school before Gropius?
Henry van de Velde
He was forced out in 1915 for being Belgian while Germany was at war with his country.
Q 11Which Swiss painter created and taught the Bauhaus preliminary course, the Vorkurs, until 1923?
Johannes Itten
Itten's mystical, Expressionist approach gave way to Moholy-Nagy's New Objectivity when he resigned.
Q 12Which Hungarian designer replaced Itten at the Bauhaus and later founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago?
László Moholy-Nagy
His Chicago school, backed by industrialist Walter Paepcke, became the Institute of Design at IIT.
Q 13Which Russian painter, a founder of Der Blaue Reiter, joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1922?
Wassily Kandinsky
Paul Klee had joined the year before; Breuer later built a duplicate of his tubular chair for Kandinsky's quarters.
Q 21Where did Mies set up the Bauhaus after Dessau closed in 1932?
A derelict factory in Berlin, rented with his own money
Students painted the interior white and the school ran ten months before the Gestapo arrived.
Q 22Nazi writers attacking the Bauhaus as 'un-German' stirred controversy over which feature in particular?
Flat roofs
The regime later cracked down on what it called the cosmopolitan modernism of 'degenerate art'.
Q 23After emigrating, Mies van der Rohe became head of architecture at which Chicago institution?
The Armour Institute, now IIT
Q 14Oskar Schlemmer, head of the Bauhaus theatre workshop, is best known for which work?
The Triadic Ballet
Costumed dancers became geometric shapes in what he called a party of form and colour.
Q 15What was the Bauhaus's first major joint building project, completed in 1921 for a Berlin timber merchant?
The Sommerfeld House
The log-built house in Berlin was in the craft-driven spirit of the early school; the Haus am Horn came in 1923.
Q 16The Haus am Horn was built for the Bauhaus exhibition of which year?
1923
The following year the conservatives won the state election, halved the school's funding, and the Bauhaus announced it would leave Weimar.
Q 17The design school left behind in the school's first city after the 1925 move renamed itself what in 1996?
Bauhaus-University Weimar
It had long been a technical university of architecture and civil engineering before reclaiming the name.
Q 18Who designed the definitive 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau?
Walter Gropius
The building and the nearby Masters' Houses made the school an 'icon of modernism'; war damage was rebuilt from 1965.
Q 19Besides five Dessau apartment blocks, what big commission did the Bauhaus win under Hannes Meyer?
A trade union college in Bernau
The ADGB school still stands; Meyer sold clients on measurements, calculations and off-the-shelf components.
Q 20Which close confidant was the only new faculty member Mies van der Rohe appointed as director?
Lilly Reich
Reich co-designed the Barcelona chair with him for the 1929 German Pavilion.
Under Philip Johnson's sponsorship he became one of the world's pre-eminent architects.
Q 24Gropius, Breuer and a third Bauhaus master regrouped in which 1930s London housing block?
Isokon, Lawn Road
From there Gropius and Breuer went on to teach at Harvard, where their students included Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei.
Q 25Marcel Breuer designed the tubular-steel Wassily chair while running which Bauhaus workshop?
Cabinet-making
The name came decades later from Italian maker Gavina, which discovered the Kandinsky anecdote while researching the chair.
Q 26Breuer lost a German patent battle over the cantilever chair to which Dutch designer?
Mart Stam
The two had worked on the idea independently; Stam guest-lectured at the school but was never formally on staff.
Q 27What was the most profitable product the Bauhaus ever made?
Wallpaper
The furniture became more famous, but the wallpaper paid the bills.
Q 28The Barcelona chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe and a collaborator for what?
The German Pavilion at a 1929 exposition
Knoll has made it since 1964 but only named it after the pavilion in 1987.
Q 29Marianne Brandt, famous for sleek lamps and ashtrays, headed which Bauhaus workshop in Dessau from 1928?
Metal
She had trained as an Expressionist painter before turning to industrial design.
Q 30Anni Albers took up weaving at the Bauhaus for what reason?
Gender bias kept her out of other workshops
She studied under Gunta Stölzl and became the century's leading textile artist, blurring craft and art.