There's a reason why Bauhaus architects and designers struggled to forge careers in the UK, says Owen Hatherley in the latest instalment of our Bauhaus 100 series.

"My only criticism of Mr Moholy-Nagy is that he is a gentleman with a modernistic tendency who produces pastiches of photographs of a surrealist type, and I am not at all clear that we should fall for this."
This is Frank Pick, the famous design director of London Transport, outlining his views of the Bauhaus designer in a letter to the architect Oliver Hill, designer of the British Pavilion at the Paris Expo of 1937.
This great exhibition, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, became notorious for the juxtaposition of three pavilions. Two neoclassical monoliths, the Nazi and the Soviet, were placed opposite, while cowering, crushed beneath them was the lightweight, modernist Spanish Republic Pavilion, which contained within it Picasso's Guernica ? a portent of the catastrophe just around the corner. Pick insisted that the British Pavilion be an island of British conservatism and common sense
In this maelstrom, Pick insisted that the British Pavilion be an island of British conservatism and common sense. Because of this, Hill's suggestion that the Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy, then resident in London, work on photomontages to decorate the building was sharply rejected.
"Let us leave the continent to pursue their own tricks and go our own way traditionally", he brusquely concluded. Bauhaus just w...