In 1923 the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy was appointed to teach at the renowned Bauhaus, a school of architecture and design in Weimar, Germany. Working across artistic media, this institution sought to conduct fundamental research on aesthetics and human perception in order to find new modes of craftmanship suited for the industrial age. Moholy-Nagy’s arrival at the Bauhaus prompted a pedagogical shift, namely, from a notion of artistic abstraction as an expression of the spiritual toward a more scientifically minded interest in the industrial grammar of grids and modular elements. For Moholy-Nagy, painting and drawing would serve as a testing ground for formal techniques applicable beyond the fine arts. Thus, his Planes Cutting Planes employs a spare, architectural vocabulary typical of building blueprints: the shapes are designed not solely for aesthetic contemplation but also to evoke new ways of constructing the urban landscapes of the future.