The Bauhaus, a design school founded a century ago this month 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.

That legacy was eventually eclipsed by subsequent movements — most notably postmodernism, a transition satirized in Tom Wolfe’s 1981 polemic “From Bauhaus to Our House.” But now, at the Bauhaus’s centennial, the school is once again being celebrated worldwide.

Not only are new museums devoted to the Bauhaus opening their doors in Weimar and Dessau — the two cities in eastern Germany where it briefly prospered before being chased away by rightward political shifts — but countless exhibitions, symposiums and newspaper articles (including this one) are attempting to explain its significance.