Bauhaus Dream House

This original study brings critical social theory to bear on the ideas of architectural and design education at the Bauhaus - tracing the spread and influence of these ideas worldwide. Written for those in the fields of architectural and design education, architectural history and critical pedagogy, it is also for teachers and students in German art and cultural history.

Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology. Contributors Alice Arnold, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Marshall Brown, Stuart Candy, Jessica Charlesworth, Elizabeth J. Chin, Taeyoon Choi, B. Coleman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael J. Golec, Kate Hennessy, Matthew Hockenberry, Joi Ito, Denisa Kera, N. Adriana Knouf, Silvia Lindtner, Shannon Mattern, Ramia Mazé, V. Mitch McEwen, Oliver Neumann, Paul Pangaro, Tim Parsons, Nassim Parvin, Joanne Pouzenc, Luiza Prado de O. Martin, Daniela K. Rosner, Natalie Saltiel, Trudi Lynn Smith, Carol Strohecker, Alex Taylor, Martin Thaler, Fred Turner, Andre Uhl, Jeff Watson, Robert Wiesenberger

After critiquing—and infuriating—the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our Haus. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass and steel box designed buildings that have influenced—and infected—America’s cities.

The aim of this book is to expand the subject and matter of architecture, and to explore their interdependence. There are now many architectures. This book acknowledges architecture far beyond the familiar boundaries of the discipline and reassesses the object at its centre: the building. Architectural matter is not always physical or building fabric. It is whatever architecture is made of, whether words, bricks, blood cells, sounds or pixels. The fifteen chapters are divided into three sections - on buildings, spaces and bodies - which each deal with a particular understanding of architecture and architectural matter. The richness and diversity of subjects and materials discussed in this book locates architecture firmly in the world as a whole, not just the domain of architects. In stating that architecture is far more than the work of architects, this book aims not to deny the importance of architects in the production of architecture but to see their role in more balanced terms and to acknowledge other architectural producers. Architecture can, for example, be found in the incisions of a surgeon, the instructions of a choreographer or the movements of a user. Architecture can be made of anything and by anyone.

This innovative study considers one of the most important art and design movements of the 20th century, the Bauhaus, in conjunction with current research in public relations and organizational communication, elaborating on the mechanisms of internal and external communication available to influence the stakeholders in politics, society, industry, and the art world. In a movement where a substantial share of productivity ran in measures to highlight the public value of the institution funded by the taxpayer, the directors, and other persons in charge, the Bauhaus developed comprehensive strategies to communicate their messages to a variety of target groups such as politicians and economic leaders, intellectuals and other artists, current and prospective students, and the general public. To achieve this goal, the Bauhaus anticipated many instruments of modern public relations and corporate communications, including press releases, staging of events, media publications, community building, lobbying, and the creation of nationwide public presence. Rössler argues that as an organization, the Bauhaus cultivated corporate behavior and, most prominently, a corporate design which unfolded revolutionary power. The basic achievements of new typography (a label coined at the Bauhaus) determine visual communication to this day, while the Bauhaus moved from an institutional organization to a community. Beginning with an overview of the Bauhaus’ corporate identity and a close examination of the respective directors’ roles for internal and external communication, this book visits exhibitions, events, and the media attention they evoked in newspapers and contemporary periodicals, along with media products designed at the Bauhaus such as magazines, books, and bank notes.

Analyzing a range of ideas from biological, evolutionary and anthropological theories to a variety of feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and constructivist discourses, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the problematics of gender and power in architectural and urban design. Topics range from conceptions of postulated matriarchal architecture in Old Europe to contemporary technologies of control; from the mechanisms of gaze to architectural performatives; from the under-representation of women in the planning profession to the integration of gender issues to the curriculum. The particular strengths of the book lie in its inclusiveness and critical analysis. It is not a partisan defence of feminism or any other theory, but a critical introduction to the issues relating to gender. Moreover, the conclusions reach beyond a narrow gender studies perspective to social and ethical considerations that are unavoidable in any responsible architectural or urbanistic practice. With its broad range and balanced analysis of different theories, the book is suitable as an overview of gender studies in architecture and useful for any designer who is concerned with the social effects of the built environment.

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk—the ideal of the “total work of art”—has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk’s lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea’s evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks. By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely "global" history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism's normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged. With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.