Whether you know it or not, we're still living in the wake of the Bauhaus: Teachers working alongside students. Form following function, and a religious devotion to simplicity. Dissolving the boundaries between art, craft, and design. Those are all Bauhaus nuggets. But they didn't emerge fully formed. They were the product of twenty years of teeth gnashing, in Germany--and that process is detailed in a new MoMA exhibit opening this Sunday, "Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity." It's a massive retrospective encompassing more than 400 works. Here's a taste.

Pictured: Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932

The movement's leading-light of architecture was Walter Gropius. Here, in this drawing for the Törten housing estate, you can see the Bauhaus ethos at work: Colors were meant to be used not decoratively, but to denote the basic building elements of the design.

While Gropius was designing student housing, Josef Albers applied a similar idea and aesthetic to these now iconic stacking tables. They still fetch over $2,000. Not bad, Josef!

Mass-media and advertising were still in their infancy, but these were a hot topic. Here, an "illuminated advertising sphere" by Herbert Bayer. Designed in 1924, but you could probably walk into the Rockwell Group right now and see something similar.

A tea set by Marianne Brand: Stripped of adornment, but still undeniably fancy, in the way it makes silver look industrial-tough, rather than decorative frilly.

Designed by Josef Hartwig, a chess set whose pieces are shaped to be recognizable--while also denoting how the piece moves on the board. Another stunning set by Hartwig just came . back into production.

One of the most famous pieces produced by the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe's armchair made of tubular steel--which at that time was an industrial marvel, much like carbon fiber today.

A drawing by László Moholy-Nagy, which also happens to bear a striking resemblance to the early work of Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. Heard of them?

Steampunks, eat your hearts out: A lighting prop by László Moholy-Nagy.