Image as investigation: sciences of the otherworldly at the Bauhaus

While modern architecture and design have often been seen as harsh and impersonal, this essay reassesses this association through a closer look at the influence of mysticism and the occult on the Bauhaus, an interwar German reform movement and school for art, craft, design, and architecture. Even as they developed their famous streamlined designs, members of the school also produced images based on alternative religions, spiritism, and other experimental and occult practices. Such images participated in a broader context of research into the otherworldly and a rediscovery of nature and the environment. Reintegrating this other history into what we know of the Bauhaus allows us to understand modernism anew, not as cold and soulless but as part of larger attempts to perceive and shape a new world that was quickly unfolding around its subjects.