Bauhaus was designed in 1975 by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso, who drew heavily on Herbert Bayer’s seminal work creating the Universal typeface in 1925. Bayer was commissioned to design a typeface for all the printed material of the Bauhaus – the famous German school of architecture and design — and designed an uncial geometric typeface devoid of serifs or any other adornment. By contrast, Benguiat’s Bauhaus includes a traditional complement of both upper – and lower-case characters, and many subfamilies, such as ITC Bauhaus CE, have the additional glyphs necessary to support Central European and other language-dependent character sets.

Benguiat’s design remained largely faithful to the spirit of Bayer’s work, which itself was inspired by the groundbreaking work of the Bauhaus. In that work, design was broken down to the absolutely essential, and geometric shapes such as triangles, circles and rectangles were emphasized. This influence of this thinking is clear in ITC Bauhaus.

References
http://www.type.nu/bayer/univer.html
http://www.linotype.com/240634/itcbauhaus-family.html?subviewmode=FONTS&samplestr=Sing+a+Song

Bauhaus is used frequently for public signage, especially to evoke the art deco feel of the early 20th century, and for other display and decorative uses. It’s also found online and in broadcast images, especially advertising headlines and broadcast programming titles. Its very distinctive appearance also makes it popular as a wordmark, for logo design and packaging design. The monotone strokes and lack of serifs or other adornment make it unsuitable for continual text, although it can be used in presentations and booklets that rely more on graphics than on text.

Bauhaus was used as the on-screen title for the 1970s sitcom The Jeffersons, the wordmark of the (now defunct) Bamberger’s department store chain, and is used for onscreen graphics for the Internet cartoon Homestar Runner.