Essentially concerned with the spread of Bauhaus pedagogy and ideals in the sphere of design, architecture and art education, this book should be read with caution by anyone seeking to access the vision, hopes and aspirations of the original Bauhaus. Rüedi Ray has a very different tale to tell. She reminds us that ‘a critical understanding of visual and spatial disciplines as tools of dream-consciousness – and awakening – and of institutions that sustain, develop and transform them, is central to advancing a just society and education that can counter the uncritical production of spatial and visual environments and their producers’ (p. 29), but the Bauhaus does not come off well. Ray traces how the Bauhaus model of education was developed in the changing spaces and places and troubled decades after the closure of the school in 1933. Designating the Bauhaus a Benjamin ‘dream-house’, as identified in his Arcades Project, a dream-house that both dazzles and intrigues and is capable of covering up the worst excesses of capitalism and exploitation, prejudice and privilege, Rüedi Ray develops this idea to trace how the Bauhaus's original pedagogy dispersed over the world.

Rüedi Ray's is a global narrative covering swathes of time, including the medieval ‘Tracing House’. Patterns do emerge, and for her these are those of appropriation, identity formation and fierce guardianship of professional and privileged knowledge. In the face of the ideals of the young and not so young Bauhaüsler, this is a depressing conclusion indeed. ‘Charnel House’, for example, is an unfortunate designation for the important body-based practices of the Bauhaus.

Nevertheless, the book is thoroughly researched, sometimes provocative and often fascinating, and its strength lies in Rüedi Ray's identification of this misappropriation worldwide, in locations as far-flung as Turkey and Brazil. The sections on the USSR and the 1938 MOMA exhibition are outstanding. Her research into the Bauhaus firm, the GmbH, is a fresh insight into the financial workings of the institution and the pressure it was under.

Rüedi Ray believes that the Bauhaus acted as a ‘capitalist agency’ (p. 5) by its neutralizing, stripped-down and androgynized iconography, so that ‘fantasy and marketing, as well as personal and institutional networks’ could form the Bauhaus as a ‘global educational model central to constructing the idea of twentieth-century modernity’ (p. 8), but typically, when she concludes by interpreting the abstract masks and costumed figures staring down at us from the cover of the MOMA catalogue in 1938 as uneasy and sinister harbingers of what was to follow, she underestimates how much the rich and as-yet untapped Bauhaus heritage could contribute to her deeply ethical and laudable hope of creating a ‘just society’.