In late 1932, students and one of the world's most famous architects painted the brick walls of an abandoned Berlin factory white, paying for the paint themselves, trying to keep a design school alive. Ten months later the Gestapo padlocked the doors. This episode tells the biography of the Bauhaus as if it were a living institution: its 1919 founding by Walter Gropius in a devastated post-war Weimar, its warring directors, and how its forced closure scattered its ideas across the globe.

We explore Johannes Itten's mystical preliminary course with its breathing exercises and vegetarian diet, Gropius's 1923 pivot to art and technology as a new unity, the move to Dessau and its famous glass curtain wall building, Hannes Meyer's profitable but politically dangerous functionalism, and Mies van der Rohe's final attempt to depoliticize the school ...