The Bauhaus, a design school founded over a century ago in Germany, lasted just 14 years before the Nazis shut it down. And yet in that time it proved a magnet for much that was new and experimental in art, design, and architecture—and for decades after, its legacy played an outsize role in changing the physical appearance of the daily world, in everything from book design to household lighting to lightweight furniture.

The Bauhaus, which translates literally as “House of Building,” aimed to make architecture the convener and unifier of all the arts. As a whole, the disciplines embraced industrial production and aimed to create an integrated daily environment where design touched everything, from a teaspoon to a city—as its founding director, Walter Gropius, later put it. The distinction between the fine and the useful arts was to be abolished.

The Bauhaus produced one of the most powerful expressions of the view that design was everything. It served, in a way, as the embassy of Modernist design. But its success has often led to a reductionism in our understanding of the rich nexus of artistic movements that crisscrossed at the school itself and the diverse developments it helped inspire.

There's no debate about the significance of the Bauhaus. But in celebrating the Bauhaus the way we do—highlighting its allegedly far-flung influence in space and time—are we blurring our understanding of what the school achieved, of the challenges it faced, and the ramifications of both in the 91 years since it closed?

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where from 2007 to 2013 he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and a member of the Pritzker Prize Jury. Holding a BA from Columbia, an MA from King's College, Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia, his broad interests center on Modern architectural history and the intersections of architecture and new technologies in the modern period, especially photography and film.

, in the Oxford History of Art series