Storythings
Who We Are
What We Do
Contact Us
Search
Log In
Search
Jul 2, 2026
Adam Lawrenson crushes on the Bauhaus
Adam Lawrenson crushes on the Bauhaus
00:00
23:38
Transcript
0:00
It pulled together into a single place, uh, artists, sculptors, architects, textile designers. I think someone taught the ballet there.
0:10
[instrumental music] Hello, and welcome to Creative Crush, a podcast in which marketing's smartest minds step away from the brand and talk about the piece of creative work or the creative inspiration that they keep coming back to time and time again.
0:34
Today, we are speaking to, uh, the brilliant Adam Laurenson. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do, Adam? [laughs] Yes, I will try.
0:44
Um, I've worked, uh, in the creative arts for the last 20 years, uh, across different disciplines, uh, branding, product design, service design, advertising, growth, consultancy, and I now run a, um,
1:04
I guess, half,
1:07
uh, consultancy accelerator, half investment business that, uh, invests capital in fast growth businesses but then supports them, uh, through, uh, the skills that I've learnt over the last 20 years, whether product, brand, marketing, growth.
1:26
Uh, very interdiscipline- interdisciplinary skills, we should say there. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about who you're gonna be talking about today or what you're gonna be talking about?
1:36
Who is your creative crush? Uh, for me, it's, uh, it's not a, a, a single person or a single moment in time. It's a, it's an art movement called the, the Bauhaus. Uh, it ran from, I think, 1919 to 1930s.
1:56
When we talk about modern design and architecture, one of the most significant movements that comes to our mind is the Bauhaus. Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus was not just a school.
2:07
It was a groundbreaking approach that reshaped the way we think about modern creativity.
2:12
The thing that, I guess, initially interested me in, in the Bauhaus is, yeah, I mean, you've just said it there, its multidisciplinary nature.
2:20
It, it, it, it pulled together into a single place, uh, artists, sculptors, architects, textile designers. I think someone taught the ballet there. Um, they had craftsmen. They had, uh, high conceptual artists.
2:37
They had, um, builders of cities, and they brought them all together to this sort of single place to try and build the future. In fact, I think that's what Bauhaus means.
2:48
It's a, a house of building or a building house, you know, a, a school of building, if you like. Um, interestingly, that seems sort of more and more connected to what I do now than what interested me initially.
3:05
Well, just taking you back to that initial interest, um, can you take us all the way back to when you first heard the name Bauhaus and kind of discovered a little bit more? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was, um...
3:22
All, all I wanted to do was be an artist at, at, at school, um, and, you know, properly obsessed over that. Wanted to go to art school, um, near the end of my school career, and I guess got that
3:40
sort of moment of reality where you start to realize [laughs] that the, uh, chances of you making any cash, uh, doing fine art was vanishingly small, and it, um, had second thoughts.
3:54
Uh, you know, all, all I was into was con- conceptual art as well. I was really interested in, uh, the concept behind things and therefore got into super niche, uh, art, um, very, very abstract, very, very conceptual.
4:10
You know, did some quite odd things, I think, at, at school, uh, as part of, um, my A-level arts but just realized that it probably wasn't the s- the most sensible thing to do.
4:23
Uh, so went and studied art history, uh, and architecture and philosophy, uh, at university, and most of it was just so extreme.
4:34
You know, l- like I said, I, I was into conceptual art, and yet the things that you were taught at university as part of an ar- an art history degree and indeed philosophy was, was so extreme in, in the way in which they sort of philosophized about what it is that the, the artist was, was, was there to do and was trying to achieve and then, um, as part of an architectural
4:57
course, sort of found the Bauhaus, and it was just a light bulb moment. It was this moment where you could connect, and there were, there were some pretty wacky people, uh, who were part of the, the, the Bauhaus.
5:08
It wasn't all, you know, restrained industrial designers. There were some pretty out there characters, but their main thing was to try and, um, connect that conceptual,
5:21
uh, high art with modern industrial processes to try and mass produce almost these, these, um, uh, these, these conceptual ideas, and I was just fascinated by that.
5:36
One, fascinated by the kind of cross-functionality of bringing all of these people together that had never worked together previously, and, and secondly, the, the fact that you had a kind of commercial angle to the first sort of
5:50
moment where you could see what kind of commercial artists could do. Can I just read you a, a little bit from Walter Gropius, who kind of founded the school?
5:59
He wrote this manifesto, and this kind of, this end bit of the manifesto just really kind of sums it up.
6:06
Uh, the first line is, "Let us create a new guild of craftsmen without class distinctions but raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Next bit's a bit of a long sentence, so stick with me.
6:17
"Together, let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like a crystal symbol of a new faith."
6:36
I love it. It's great. It's a, it's such a brilliant manifesto. I, yeah, I think that is the dawn of it, so that'll be 1919, and I think it's got a sort of Feininger sort of woodcut on the front of it.
6:51
Um, later, I think, you know, they were in Weimar at the time, and then they moved.
6:56
They got kicked out effectively by the Weimar Republic for being too lefty, and they got moved to Dessau, where Gropius actually built the entire building and all of the interiors and all the furniture.
7:09
So it was this sort of monument to everything Bauhaus that was mult- everything multidisciplinary.
7:16
And I think they, he produced a sort of second manifesto at that point, where it becomes even more commercialized, even more sort of industrial, even more sort of machine as medium, even more as, um...
7:30
I think, you know, it's Corbusier, wasn't it? He said sort of a, a building as a machine for living later on.
7:35
All, all inspired from this moment, and I think then you go and look at, you know, Dieter Rams and his sort of 12 principles of design, and it's basically rewritten Bauhaus stuff, you know. Taking out the superfluous.
7:50
Um, making sure there was nothing by accident. Making sure that every detail is there to, you know, perform a, you know, purpose or function. Form, form as function, which is...
8:04
I mean, if you've ever read any sort of UI/UX sort of books or product design thinking, it is littered with it. So you sort of go Bauhaus, Rams, iPhone, and then everything sort of product design after that.
8:19
It's kind of interesting.
8:20
Well, I was, I was saying to super producer Chris before, before, um, this call that I sat down to do a little bit of research for this call, um, yesterday, and I was trying to think, "Well, how, how has Bauhaus touched the modern world and touched my life?"
8:36
And I looked down, and I realized I was sat in a Wassily chair. Uh, uh, Chris put a picture of a Wassily chair here for people who are watching.
8:45
Um, and I was drinking, like lemon water, as you can see now, and I'd, I'd squeezed it with a, a, a Stark lemon squ- lemon squeezer, which is massively influenced by it.
8:55
One of my lamps is massively influenced by the Bauhaus lamps. And
9:00
the font that I use most when I'm doing design things is Futura, which I don't know whether you know is massively an influence, and the story of Futura itself is really, really fascinating.
9:12
It, you know, it connects to, uh, the rise of the Nazis and, and the Bauhaus philosophy in really fascinating ways. So it really is just everywhere, isn't it?
9:22
Yeah, I mean, all of the design layouts and grid systems that, that, that you'll work on, whether you work in Figma or before that material design or, you know, grid layouts, et cetera, were all designed by, um, Moholy-Nagy and, uh, Albers and Itten, et cetera.
9:41
Those grid systems, and Mondrian after that I guess, were designed by them. The thinking with color theory, with,
9:51
um, you know, the accent colors and primary colors, all the UI interaction sort of principles are based on that, as well as, yeah, like you say, all the typography, all the sans serif sort of predominance all, all comes from, from there.
10:06
Uh, well, this is the thing. It's easy now to post-rationalize that it all comes from there, and then you find out as you dig into it, you know, it doesn't quite. And obviously it was, um,
10:18
um, it's easy to sort of point back to that point, but there was no other place that I guess defined the concept or the thinking for the, you know, the, the, the disciplines that we work in.
10:32
Yeah, I mean, th- there's an argument to say that, uh, the Bauhaus school and the movement is post-rationalized as great, but all those things might have happened anyway.
10:43
But that doesn't matter because it, sometimes it takes Walter Gropius to bring, to create the space for all these incredibly talented people to come and work together for it to go and influence other people anyway. So,
10:56
you know, history has given us people that have done that, you know. I'm, I come from Manchester in the UK. Uh, the very first time... One of my first favorite groups happened to be a group called Bauhaus.
11:10
The very first time I went to see Bauhaus was at a club called The Hacienda after it had just opened, and that was run by a guy called Tony Wilson who just wanted to create...
11:19
He was obsessed with modernism and just wanted to create a space, these incredible people, interdisciplinary people, to come and work together. So its influences, it really is everywhere. Yeah.
11:30
That's, that's interesting. I mean, you know, great salesmen. I mean, we've seen in agency land, you know, there are,
11:36
you know, many, many agencies or studios which are kind of creating the new form, new way of thinking about it, and then there's one or two who become famous because they're the ones who, who sell it best, who, who, who write it down, who understand how to sort of, yeah, absorb all of the influence that's around them and turning it into, you know, a movement, a school.
11:57
Uh, you know, ultimately it's, it's kind of great branding, you know, in its, uh, in its purest sense. But yeah, I mean, you can kind of go,
12:07
you know, to plenty of places before that that influence it, whether it's sort of Distill or Dada or even I think Peter Behrens, who...
12:16
A lot of the people who came into the Bauhaus, so- Um, you know, Mies van der Rohe and, uh, Walter Gropius sort of worked with Peter Behrens before. I, I think he was the first person to create a design system for AEG.
12:31
Um, and that was, you know, designing everything, so the letterheads, the logo, the posters, the, um, the, the building itself.
12:40
And then they came and did a similar thing, I guess, at the Bauhaus, but not the first time it was done, but certainly the, the time it was best sold. Can I just take you back for a moment to your university?
12:53
Can you remember what, what was the thing or the person or the idea that took you from thinking, "This is interesting," to,
13:06
"Oh wow, this is kind of, you know, this is quite game-changing in terms of how I see the world"?
13:13
Yeah, it started in architecture through Gropius and everything that he was doing to sort of define what became the international style, I guess.
13:22
Um, the Bauhaus itself was fascinating because they brought all of these people together. When you talk about, you know, startups now talking about talent density and y- [laughs] you know.
13:32
I mean, anybody who is anybody worked there. You know, and, and there seems unrelated to it as well. You know, Kan- Kandinsky was mad.
13:43
You know, he, he thought that his paintings were gonna create a second coming, you know, like [laughs] uh, that, it... history itself would end.
13:52
[laughs] But he was the guy who did the color theory there, you know, and, and he's the sort of person who has some ways influenced his rational, um, branding today, and he's a madman.
14:03
And so it, it was really interesting that you could bring together these people in service of something pretty commercial and rational. That bit was, you know, absolutely fascinating to me.
14:17
And, and then, yeah, I, I left uni and did a postgrad at Falmouth College of Art in Creative Advertising, and then got into many of the things that you kinda learn from there, you know, l- layout design, you know, typography, headline, the way in which you read a poster, you know, that all sort of goes back to that.
14:38
Branding, you know, was one of the other kind of big things that I did and never think about, you know, traditional branding, logo design, um, comes, comes from there, like I said, c- color theory.
14:50
And then you get into the really rational design systems, components, et cetera, of modern product design. How did the influence show up in your work? I guess the, the, the backbone of it is
15:09
cross-functionality.
15:10
And if, if you look what happened at the, at the beginning of, of the, the Bauhaus, they'd bring people in and they would basically break down what they thought they knew about the visual world or about their craft, and they would teach them
15:24
about all of the different disciplines. And so early on in my career...
15:29
And again, it was, it was another thing that they, they said now I think about it, which was they tried to sort of break down the fine art is the best, architecture is the best, um, 'cause they're just not.
15:43
And I, I've been in so many advertising agencies at the start of my career where they just thought that was the thing, and they were so snooty of everything else.
15:50
And the same when you went into branding agencies, so snooty of everything that wasn't the bit of branding that they thought was the important bit. And you can do the same for every, any, any of the disciplines.
16:01
And I never understood that. It, it never made any sense to me. I wanted to learn all of them because the thing that was important was the, the business that you're building, the, the, the multidisciplinary thing.
16:15
That was always what fascinated me about it and why I keep, I keep returning to it, um, because the, the thinking behind it and the way in which you kind of approach your creative discipline just made sense. Yeah.
16:31
I mean, it b- one thing that was really kind of fascinating about, um, about their approach was they put... Ultimately it was about people.
16:40
Everything about Bauhaus was about people, whether it was the people who were designing, most importantly, the people who were using the things.
16:48
That was kind of what was, was most important, how they designed for something to be super usable. And to do that, as you've said, you kind of have to strip away a lot of the, lot of the, um,
17:04
for want of a better word, unnecessary, uh, antsy design and get straight to the, the usability of it, but still be able to do that in a very, very beautiful way. And that will just serve anyone forever, you know.
17:19
It's just such a brilliant kind of approach to, to, to having all elements of your work putting the user first.
17:26
Yeah, I mean, user-centered design basically can be traced directly back to that, and being able to remove everything that's not in service of the service that you are trying to, trying to build. And, you know,
17:41
that entire di- design practice, I guess, has got, got, got its, um, got its roots there. I, I guess the, [laughs] that sort of contradictory part of it, and may- we've all seen this, you know.
17:52
When you're, you're, you're trying to build a sort of practice in which you're, um, working from best practices, and that's useful in terms of what, what you do. Um, but if...
18:04
But there's also an importance to sort of do something that's a little bit out there as well to kind of push, p- push the boundaries, and they were the best at framing, uh, how, you know, form follows function, try and create something usable.
18:17
But your, your Wassily chair is renowned [laughs] for being quite uncomfortable. You know, it is, it's, it's perfect. It's just the structure- Of a chair.
18:26
So the, it, it is not trying to be a chair, it is trying to be a support structure from which a person can sit, sit on it.
18:34
And so everything else is sort of stripped back and removed, and the problem is that they've left with something that is a little bit uncomfortable because they've been so purist in their desire to sort of create...
18:46
And you see that design all the time. People who have taken that sort of slightly too far. But in doing so, they've kind of created a way of thinking that then has helped people
18:59
s- sort of go through, um, you know, u- use a center design, but taken to its ultimate limits.
19:07
So as someone who, um, who's inspired by the Bauhaus and whose primary role today is bringing multidisciplinary people together to create new things, what do you think are the key disciplines that, that
19:25
are designing the future? Because that's what the Bauhaus was, it was bringing together who was gonna design the future. What do you think are the, the most important disciplines today? Gosh, great question.
19:36
I, I think it's, it moves all the time, and it is related to the point I said earlier about, you know, not, um, or, or being open to different disciplines.
19:47
That's effectively one of the key skills in a, in a sort of multidisciplinary world, is being able to appreciate the other skillsets that are involved in building something, and making sure that you, um, can conduct those different skillsets with enough knowledge
20:05
to understand how they work and how they can contribute. Uh, but, uh, also the humility to sort of understand that there's gonna be people who have got, you know, greater levels of depth in there.
20:16
I think the other part, and this is just the way the world will continue to g- to go as the tools, uh, progress, is that you have to be, um, sort of more T-shaped in, in yourself.
20:28
You know, the, the clo- uh, you know, I've never been an engineer, but I'm getting closer and closer to, to, to engineering in, in the world of AI, and the same as an engineer is getting closer and closer to product in the world of AI for exactly the same reason.
20:41
And the tools are proliferating. That means that, you know, creativity, concept, cost functionality are becoming the, um, I guess the tokens for, for, for, for building the future.
20:53
If you can adopt the right tools and you can get people who have got a broad understanding of the different disciplines,
21:01
don't necessarily know any of the specialisms, they're the ones who are going to, um, you know, build the future and be able to build the, the future at the, at the pace that [laughs] is going to be required to keep up, because bloody hell, it's going quick, isn't it?
21:15
To wrap things up, is there one piece of design that you always think to that when you think about Bauhaus? The, there's...
21:30
I, I guess I've been to a lot of, a lot of the buildings, and a lot of them are sort of time and a place.
21:37
You know, they, they couldn't really crack it because, um, they wanted to create these buildings that effectively you could see the function of them.
21:49
And it's, uh, the materials, you know, for all the reinforced concrete, et cetera, don't
21:55
really allow for that, and hence a lot of those modernist buildings have somewhat, you know, cracked and fallen into disrepute, and, and a lot of it hasn't worked. But there's a few that, you know, re- really have.
22:09
You know, if you've ever been... And they also show the contradiction, I guess, of it anyway.
22:13
So if, if you've been to the Seagram Building in, in, in New York, you know, Mies's, Mies's building, obviously post-Bauhaus, but, but inspired by all of the buildings that he's kind of created.
22:22
And it's the sort of, on the surface of it, it's like any other skyscraper, and yet it's not. It's, it, it, it's amazing. It's so beautiful. It's so perfect. And it's, uh, stood the test of time.
22:35
It looks immaculate today. And obviously there's a part of it which is he, he, he was great and it's been looked after, et cetera.
22:43
But the other, I, I think it's still the most expensive facade ever hung on a, on a skyscraper. It's bronze. You know, it's like, it's prohibitively expensive.
22:52
[laughs] So it's kind of the only way to make it work is to have materials that are so fiendishly expensive that it therefore isn't an industrial mass-produced building, so therefore it doesn't work.
23:06
[laughs] But it's, but it's beau- but it's beautiful. Adam, thank you for taking part in Creative Crush. If you are listening for the first time, please, uh, subscribe, like, and share wherever you get your podcasts.
23:21
If you're watching on YouTube, just hit a like in the button below, and thank you for listening. [outro music]
Creative Crush
Listen on
Apple Podcasts
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Spotify
YouTube
YouTube
Recent episodes
Graham Wylie crushes on The Last Of Us
Jun 18, 2026
Jinal Shah crushes on Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad
Jun 4, 2026
Glyn Britton crushes on "Parade" by Prince
May 20, 2026
