When the famous Bauhaus school of architecture and design first opened in Weimar, Germany in 1919, the majority of students were women. That wasn’t by design, though founder Water Gropius took the unusual stance of declaring equality among genders; it was simply that more women than men applied the first year. The school’s focus on ushering the world into a new era attracted all manner of radicals, which would later make it a target of the Nazis.

Talk about the Bauhaus movement tends to focus on its most famous figures – Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky. But women like Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers, Florence Henri and Ilse Fehling played key roles in Bauhaus, too, roles that don’t get enough attention. A new film called “Lotte am Bauhaus” fictionalizes their stories, focusing on a character named Lotte Brendel who draws inspiration from Alma Siedhoff-Buscher.

“Although their names were condemned to a footnote, the Bauhaus also trained women. In the hundredth anniversary of its foundation, this historical drama roams the Staatliche Bauhaus classrooms from the point of view of one of its artists, Lotte Brendel, character inspired by the great Alma Siedhoff-Buscher.”

For now, at least, the German-language film appears to only be streaming on the European service Film-in, and translations into English don’t seem to be available. Directed by Gregor Schnitzler, Lotte am Bauhaus premiered in Germany this year and stars Alicia von Rittberg.

You can learn more of the stories of the Women of Bauhaus, including sculptor Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, in a detailed profile at Curbed.

The Fort Worth Alliance Airport air traffic control tower is an FAA-certified Level 5 facility whose design showcases the best features of Modernism.

Designed by architectural firm Albert Halff Associates, the control tower opened in 1992 and is the crowning glory of Fort Worth Alliance Airport. It was also one of the final pieces of the puzzle to be put in place at AFW, which officially opened on December 14th of 1989. We’re not sure how pilots managed to fly into and out of AFW in the interim… maybe they just winged it.

Triumph Tower

Some have likened the Fort Worth Alliance Airport air traffic control tower to a big beaked bird or an ice cream cone as seen through the eyes of Picasso. The tower’s Cubist vibe isn’t all about form, however. The lower portion of the beak/cone houses microwave signal relay equipment essential to any control tower’s primary function.

Alliance Appliance

Flickr member Jeff Stvan (Diorama Sky) obviously loves airplanes but he’s got a crush on the Fort Worth Alliance
Airport air traffic control tower as well. The photographer’s many albums posted to the popular image-hosting service feature photos of the tower taken between 2003 and 2016, during Stvan’s frequent visits to the annual Bell Fort Worth Alliance Air Show.

Triangle, Manned

The Fort Worth International Air Show made its debut at Fort Worth Alliance Airport in 1993. The Bell Fort Worth Alliance Air Show succeeded its progenitor in 2006 and since that time the air show has donated over $700,000 to more than 60 non-profit organizations.

Pro & Control

If the Fort Worth Alliance Airport air traffic control tower looks familiar AND you’ve never attended an air show at Fort Worth Alliance Airport, you just may have been watching TV in 2004. Location shooting for LAX, a 13-episode TV drama starring Heather Locklear, used AFW as a substitute for Los Angeles International Airport. AFW and its iconic ATC tower still look and act as good as new… unfortunately the same can’t be said about Locklear.

Texas Angler

Jeff Stvan’s photos date from his visits to the air show in 2003, 2008, 2010 and 2016. Each time, Stvan was sure to snap the Fort Worth Alliance Airport air traffic control tower – most often as the prime subject but also incidentally as a background feature. Credit it to the power of the tower… or perhaps he was just in the mood for ice cream.

Icons of midcentury modern design by the likes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer still stand across America, showing off the simplicity, clean lines and extensive use of glass the style is known for. Many are so perfectly preserved they’ve become actual museum exhibits, while others have been well-loved and lived in over the decades or restored after falling into ruin. These 10 examples represent some of the most famous midcentury modern homes in the country, as well as a few hidden gems.

Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois (1951)

Renowned architect and designer Mies van der Rohe created the most beautiful example of a glass midcentury house for Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a place to play violin, translate poetry and enjoy the landscape on the edge of the Fox River. About 1500 square feet, the house features floor-to-ceiling glass with exposed steel structural members in white. Elevating it 5.3 feet above the flood plain didn’t prevent it from being inundated after Hurricane Ike in 2008, but most of the home’s original midcentury furniture was saved, and it re-opened to visitors by 2009.

Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1935)

The most famous creation of America’s most well-known architect, Fallingwater (or the Kaufmann Residence) is also one of the nation’s most-visited homes. Fallingwater was built right on top of a series of cascading waterfalls on Bear Run in the Allegheny Mountains, which might be a beautiful choice stylistically, but led to a series of architectural challenges and some extensive mold problems. The fact that the location on the bank of the river was not large enough to support the foundation of a typical Wright house is what prompted the cantilevered design. The original owners used it as a weekend home until 1963, when it donated to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and it’s been open to the public as a museum since 1964.

Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames, Los Angeles, California (1949)

One of about two dozen homes built as part of the Case Study House Program, an experimental architecture project sponsored by Arts & Architecture Magazine after World War II, the avant-garde Eames House resembles a Mondrian painting with its panels of white, blue and red separated by stark black beams. While many iconic midcentury modern houses have been preserved as they were originally decorated, the Eames House has a thoroughly lived-in feel because it has actually functioned as a comfortable and functional home for decades rather than a museum exhibit. It consists of a main residence and studio separated by a courtyard.

Hooper House II by Marcel Breuer, Baltimore, Maryland (1959)

Known for beautiful streamlined furniture designs as well as some of America’s most amazing Brutalist structures, Marcel Breuer showed an unusual restraint in designing the simple Hooper House II for philanthropist Edith Hooper. Two separate wings of the home, one containing the common spaces and the other the bedrooms, are connected by a glazed passageway to form a U-shape. Large segments of glass offer views of the courtyard as well as Lake Roland to the east, broken up by long walls of Maryland fieldstone.

Stahl House, Los Angeles, California (1959)

Is this the quintessential Los Angeles house? The Stahl Residence is certainly one of the city’s most iconic, cantilevering out of the Hollywood Hills to gaze upon the urban skyline, and it’s magnificent at night. The glass and steel volume projects the common areas outward while maintaining privacy for the bedrooms in a separate wing. The swimming pool serves as an interstitial space between the two. The house serves as one big lookout taking in panoramic views of Los Angeles.

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Foster an appreciation for fine modernist architecture and design from an early age with Bauhaus dollhouses, Eames block sets, mini Corbusier lounge chairs and urban planning board games. There’s a minimalist dollhouse that doubles as a coffee table, a Matryoshka-style set of paper modernist estates and of course, the pleasingly all-white Architecture Studio set by LEGO. Sure, you can get these architectural toys and games under the pretense that they’re for your kids, but we all know it’s really you who’ll be playing with them.

Home Puzzle, Babel Tower Game & Archiblocks by Cinq Points

A 3D puzzle made up of 17 minimalist white pieces that fit together into a house shape, the ‘Home Puzzle’ by Cinq Points is greater than the sum of its parts. The individual pieces are made to resemble pieces of furniture as well as buildings in a town, so kids can use their imagination to change the purpose of each shape. The Babel Tower game is like an architectural version of Jenga, while the Archiblocks construction set is “designed to capture modularity, balance and composition, their form giving them an intergenerational appeal.”

Qubis House Modernist Doll House & Coffee Table

Functioning as a modernist dollhouse for kids and a coffee table for adults, the Qubis Haus features sliding panels made of wood and perspex so the ‘architect’ can create various room layouts. Made of solid birch, it has clean modern lines honoring a period of architecture that’s not often seen in doll houses.

Dollhouse-Sized Modernist Furniture

Not just any old furniture should be placed inside a modernist dollhouse. From the Vitra Design Museum Shop comes a series of iconic pieces in miniature form, true to scale and replicating the originals down to the smallest details including the materials, the grain of the wood and the reproduction of the screws. The collection includes chairs by Charles Eames, Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.

Eames House Blocks

Bring the famous Eames House and Studio to your coffee table or playroom with this “authentically engineered” set of 36 alphabet blocks created in direct collaboration with the Eames family. The colors were so carefully matched to the original, the block set requires 29 separate hand-pulled print passes when it’s being produced.

Blokoshka: A Modernist Architectural Matryoshka

Rather than dolls, this nesting paper set reveals one modernist building after another, getting successively smaller and smaller as you pull them apart. The Blokoshka set by ZUPAGRAFIKA comes pre-cut and pre-folded so you can put them together and take them apart as many times as you like (or until the paper starts to disintegrate.) “Inspired by the former Eastern Bloc concrete modernist estates, Blokoshka is a playful tour inside out the ‘sleeping districts’ of Moscow, plattenbau constructions of East Berlin, Warsaw estates built over the ruins of old ghetto, and the panelak blocks in Prague.”

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This series of recycled cardboard models references both the functional styles of postwar Soviet architecture as well as the Russian tradition of handcrafted nesting dolls.

In the wake of World War II, European cities were forced to rebuild in a hurry, focusing on cheap and efficient structures that could effectively be mass-produced. Blokoshka (from: Matryoshka and blocks) by Polish studio Zupagrafika borrows from the pragmatic minimalism of this architectural history.

The four units represent four types of building in four places:  the sleeping districts of Moscow, Plattenbau Constructions of East Berlin, ruin-topping estates of Warsaw of moscow, and Panelak blocks of Prague.

The prefabricated pieces are nestled in sheets of cardboard, ready to be folded into place without the need for glue, scissors or other tools. Each resulting structure tucks neatly into the next, so the sets can be deployed into districts or recombined into shelf-sitting modules.