The work of Hungarian-born, German-trained furniture designer Peter Ghyczy (77) will be celebrated at a solo exhibition, "Peter Ghyczy: 50 Years of Functionalism," at the Brussels Design Museum. The exhibition runs February 7 to March 11 and will later be shown at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld. Here the artist is pictured with his iconic 'Egg' chair.

This piece of outdoor furniture created by Peter Ghyczy in 1968 is an icon of postwar modernist design and an important experiment with plastic. The patent for the design was sold to East Germany and manufactured in a small town near Dresden. There it became known as the "Senftenberg Egg" and was available to the East German public for the near equivalent of an average month's salary.

This minimalist architect and designer was one of the first to adopt industrialization practices and the "design for the masses" ideas. His iconic 1926 Barcelona Chair, made of padded leather and curved steel, along with his radical building designs, would come to define the modernist movement. Van der Rohe briefly directed the Bauhaus school and worked with Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, Behrens led the reform of German architecture and design at the turn of the century and trained the likes of Mies van der Rohe. He co-founded the German Werkbund, a collective of artists, architects, designers and industrialists who both modernized and revolutionized German design — and for whom he designed the pictured exhibition poster in 1914.

This pioneering German architect is perhaps best-known as the founder of the Bauhaus school. Highly exploratory in nature, the Bauhaus embraced the idea that artful design and industrial production were key to the future of design. Despite his success, Gropius fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power and ultimately ended up in the US, where he continued his architectural pursuits until his death.

The Swiss-French designer, writer, artist and urban planner was also a modernist architecture pioneer who heralded a raw, rationalist aesthetic. He is considered one of the leading architects of the “International Style” which developed in the 1920s and 30s and emphasized better housing solutions for people living in crowded cities — from Berlin and Paris to Chandigarh, India.

The Parisian architect, furniture and industrial designer had a 75-year-career that flourished during the modernist period by embracing new technologies like tubular steel. Her collaborations with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret included the iconic B306 Chaise Lounge from 1928 (pictured), a masterpiece of 20th century furniture-making. Her work has only recently gained widespread attention.

The Austrian-born artist and product designer became well-known during the "Made in Italy" boom of the 1960s, imbuing industrial products like lamps and typewriters with alluring organic forms. Sottsass’s design philosophy drew on pop art and postmodernism to create brightly colored and asymmetrical designs (see pictured "Altar: For the Sacrifice of My Solitude," that blurs art and design).

The Danish functionalist designer and architect is famous for his furniture designs, as well as his meticulously-planned architectural projects. His Egg chair (pictured), originally created for the SAS Royal in 1956 — a boutique hotel for which Jacobsen designed every element — is a design masterpiece. Jacobsen remains a seminal figure in the minimalist “Scandinavian design" movement.

Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid was one of the most influential architect-designers of recent decades. While she is best-known for her architectural projects — many of which feature signature sinuous curves (including the pictured Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London — Hadid and her firm designed furniture and products. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture.

In 1919, Walter Gropius became the director of a new institution, the Staatliches Bauhaus, also simply known as the Bauhaus, which merged the former Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Even though Gropius was an architect and the term Bauhaus literally translates as "construction house," the school of design did not have an architecture department until 1927.

In a pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition, Gropius stated that his goal was "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Combining influences from modernism, the English Arts and Crafts movement, and Constructivism, Gropius promoted the idea that design was to serve the community.

The most basic principle of the movement of the Bauhaus school was "form follows function." According to this idea, simple but elegant geometric shapes were designed based on the intended function or purpose of a building or an object. Illustrating this concept, the pieces of this chess game designed by Josef Hartwig (1923-24) are stylized to suggest how each of them moves and its rank of power.

The interdisciplinary approach of the school's professors and students meant that visual arts, graphic design, architecture as well as product and furniture design all came into conversation with how people lived in the modern world. They thereby actualized the concept of the "Gesamtkunstwerk," or complete work of art. This photo shows the interior of the Bauhaus school in Dessau.

The school had many major artists among its teachers. This photo from 1926 features, from left to right, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer. Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were also directors of the school.

Although the Bauhaus is associated with minimalist design, students and teachers invested an unsuspected amount of energy in creating surreal costumes for parties, as reported by Farkas Molnar in his 1925 essay, "Life at the Bauhaus." The parties began as improvised events but were later turned into large-scale productions, such as Oskar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet" from 1922 (photo).

Political tensions led to different closures of the school. After being based in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau (picture). When the Nazis gained control of the city council there, the school closed again in 1932 and was reopened in Berlin. It was closed permanently in April 1933, pressured by the Nazi regime, which criticized the institution for producing "degenerate art."

Even though the Bauhaus school was closed, different members of its staff kept spreading its idealistic concepts after they fled Germany. For example, many Jewish architects of the Bauhaus school contributed to the White City of Tel Aviv (picture), where a collection of 4,000 buildings were designed in the Bauhaus style. It is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.

Though today people might most commonly associate modern, affordable, modular furniture with Ikea, the concept wasn't born in Sweden, but rather inspired by the classic works of Bauhaus designers. This photo shows tubular furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930.

The Bauhaus school turns 100 in 2019. Germany's major celebratory program involves not only the three museums housed in the former schools in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin (picture), but also at least 10 of the country's 16 federal states will participate. Expect several exhibitions, events, publications — and even new museums.