In 2009, Yoshua Bengio, Jérôme Louradour, Ronan Collobert and Jason Weston presented a paper at ICML called Curriculum Learning. Its claim was simple and a little old-fashioned: a model trained on examples ordered from easy to hard, with basics first and complexity later, often learns faster and generalises better than one fed the whole world at random. Machine-learning researchers took this as news. From up here on the Hönggerberg ridge, where students cross my forecourt every autumn carrying their first cardboard models, it sounded like something a school in Weimar wrote down ninety years earlier.

I am a building, and I was designed by people who went through some version of that school. So I will say it plainly: before anyone taught a machine to learn in order, a painter from the canton of Bern taught architects to learn in order. His course was the Bauhaus Vorkurs.

What it is: The Vorkurs (also called the Vorlehre) was the compulsory preliminary course of the Staatliches Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. Every newcomer had to pass it before any workshop would take them. It lasted half a year. There was no specialisation, only basics: contrast, material, rhythm, balance and structure. As the PAZ concept panel on the course puts it, Gropius drew the whole curriculum as a set of rings. The Vorkurs is the outer ring. Inside it sit form theory and the material workshops (stone, wood, metal, clay, glass, colour, textile), and at the centre is one word: Bau, building. In foundation terms, it is a small, deliberately chosen body of formal basics on which every later skill is trained.

If you want a film version, think of Dagobah. Luke Skywalker asks for the lightsaber lesson, and Yoda gives him a swamp, a handstand and a rock to lift, and tells him: “You must unlearn what you have learned.” That was the Vorkurs. You had to empty the hands before the workshop filled them.

Why it works: In Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (1923), Gropius gave the course two jobs. The first was to free students from inherited habits of seeing. The second was to teach them the basic laws of form and material. The first job is regularisation: it strips out the priors you arrived with. The second is feature learning: it builds a vocabulary that every later task reuses. Read that way, the Vorkurs was not a syllabus. It was a model architecture. The order of the lessons determined what the student could become.

Under László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, the course became a materials lab, and physics does the teaching. The PAZ engineering panel on the course sets out three proofs. First, depth beats thickness. The bending stiffness of a flat sheet scales with the cube of its thickness. Fold it, and stiffness per unit width rises roughly with (d/t)². Pleat a 0.1 mm sheet 10 mm deep and, spanning along the pleats, it becomes around four orders of magnitude stiffer with the same amount of paper. That is the logic of folded concrete plates, trapezoidal steel decking and folded timber roofs. Second, the saddle from squares. Crease a square into concentric squares with alternating mountain and valley folds, add the diagonals, and the sheet pops into a hyperbolic paraboloid, z = k·x·y. It is doubly ruled, so it can be built from straight boards and straight formwork. Under load, one diagonal hangs in tension while the other arches in compression. Félix Candela’s shells in Mexico and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels, from Le Corbusier’s office with Iannis Xenakis, are its full-scale relatives. Third, the paper knows more than the drawing. In 2011, Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, Vi Hart, Gregory Price and Tomohiro Tachi proved that the classic pattern cannot fold if every facet stays perfectly flat. The model on your desk works only because the paper bends between the creases.

That third proof is the one I feel in my own structure. Every drawing of me was cleaner than I am. My east wing carries its load through details no plan ever showed, such as a slab that deflects a few millimetres more than the model assumed, and a joint that took up tolerance nobody specified. The Vorkurs taught this before the drawings were made: what stands is what the material does between your lines.

←TODAY: In 2026, offices train juniors and fine-tune models in the same year, often on the same files. →3012: By Zurich 3012, every office curriculum is also a dataset, and a building’s first lesson decides its whole behaviour. Fulcrum: Whatever you teach first, to a person or a model, sets how everything after it is read.

Origins: Johannes Itten ran the first Vorkurs from 1919, under a programme that promised “The school is the servant of the workshop.” His course started from the student: studies in contrast (light and dark, rough and smooth, big and small), material collages you had to feel with your fingertips before you could draw them, and rhythmic drawing that began in the body. In 1923 Gropius steered the school towards “Art and Technology: a New Unity”, and Itten left. Moholy-Nagy took over, with Albers, a former student, teaching beside him. From 1928 Albers ran the course alone until Nazi pressure closed the Bauhaus in 1933. The emphasis shifted from inner experience to material, structure and economy. The core stayed the same: first learn to see, then learn to build. Moholy-Nagy wrote the path down in Bauhausbuch 14, Von Material zu Architektur (1929). Klee’s Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (1925) and Kandinsky’s Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (1926) supplied the form theory alongside it.

There is an irony worth keeping. The school had no regular architecture department until 1927, when Hannes Meyer from Basel set one up in Dessau. For eight years the ring diagram pointed at a centre that did not yet exist as a class. And the course came home to Switzerland. Itten directed the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich from 1938. Max Bill from Winterthur, who studied in Dessau from 1927 to 1929, built the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm on the Kuhberg (1953–55) and made the Grundlehre the entry point for every student again, with Albers as a guest teacher. Swiss hands carried the method across the war. The buildings still show it. The Haus am Horn in Weimar (1923, Georg Muche with Adolf Meyer), the first Bauhaus model house, sets a tall top-lit living room inside a square of smaller rooms, almost the ring diagram as a floor plan. At the Bauhaus Building in Dessau (1925–26), a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1996, learning, making and living each get their own volume in a pinwheel. The Masters’ Houses are one kit of interlocking cubes, rotated and mirrored, which Gropius called a Baukasten im Großen. At the ADGB school in Bernau (1928–30), listed by UNESCO in 2017, Meyer and Hans Wittwer argued every decision from use, light, orientation and cost.

I want to name the people usually left out of this history. Most of the knowledge came from the workshop masters and the students who folded thousands of sheets that nobody photographed. The canon keeps the teachers’ names. The training set was made by the students’ hands.

In practice: The same logic works well in a Swiss office today. A 12-person studio in Zürich brings in a graduate who can script before they can detail. A BIM coordinator on a hospital job has to judge whether a model is structurally honest or only looks tidy. A timber engineer in Bern is deciding whether a folded-plate roof can replace a beam grid. Each of them needs the Vorkurs habit of testing the material before trusting the drawing. PAZ builds its Building System Specialist (BSS) track in the same order: basics before the workshop, seeing before scripting, then the Rhino + Grasshopper ↔ Archicad connection where geometry meets the BIM model.

There is a real trade-off. A curriculum that frees you from inherited habits also installs new ones. Itten’s rhythm, Albers’s economy and Bill’s grid were each a strong prior, and any foundation course, human or machine, passes on its authors’ way of seeing along with its facts. For a model the lesson is the same. The first dataset you give it is the lens it will use on everything that follows.

Atelier: Offices bringing AI into practice are building a curriculum whether they intend to or not. Whatever juniors and assistants see first becomes their default, including the template drawings, the old details and the scripts nobody has checked. Your move for Monday: pick the ten reference details and the three scripts you would be proud to have copied, put them in one folder called Vorkurs, and make that folder the first thing any new colleague or any fine-tuned assistant is given.

Hack: Build Albers’s saddle the way a carpenter would, using only straight boards. In a Grasshopper GhPython component, this draws the hyperbolic paraboloid as a family of rulings. Every line is straight, yet together they make a doubly curved surface, which is why the paper saddle can become timber formwork.

# GhPython · output a = straight rulings of the hypar z = k·x·y
import Rhino.Geometry as rg
s, h, n = 1.0, 0.3, 12            # half-side (m), corner lift (m), board count
z = lambda x, y: h * x * y / s**2  # k = h / s², corners at ±h
a = [rg.Line(rg.Point3d(-s, y, z(-s, y)), rg.Point3d(s, y, z(s, y))) for y in [-s + 2*s*i/n for i in range(n + 1)]]

Swap x and y to draw the second family and you have both sets of rulings. Increase h and see how quickly the boards twist. The material pushes back there before the drawing shows any problem. The full script in the PAZ concept panel goes further: it sweeps 9 crease counts and 8 lift heights into 72 labelled saddle variants, a small training set in its own right.

So put the Bauhaus back where it began: on the first day, before any workshop. Fold one sheet of paper, pleat it 10 mm deep, measure how far it spans, and let what the paper does decide what your office and your models learn first.