Panorama: Architecture in Germany

Since March 2009, architect and publicist Philipp Oswalt has been Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. We spoke to him about the legend of Bauhaus, education and sustainable ideas.

Mr Oswalt, what was the basis of the Bauhaus legend? What idea, what concept made the interdisciplinary school of art, design and architecture into the German “Laboratory of Modern Art” in the 1920s?

The legend begins in the time of Bauhaus itself: even back in the 1920s it was world-famous as an extremely successful cultural project. That wasn’t just because of the quality of the Bauhaus works, but also their specifically-targeted marketing. The thing is, the Bauhaus artists tried determinedly to win themselves attention and publicity right from the start. It wasn’t just the urge to be accepted that artists and designers have. Quite the opposite, good publicity was an essential act of self-assertion for the Bauhaus movement, to ensure the survival of an institution that had been exposed to political attacks from the right wing since it was founded. After the Bauhaus school had to leave first Weimar and then Dessau, it was closed in Berlin by the Nazi regime in 1933.
This history predestined Bauhaus to become stylised as a prime example of a liberal, progressive Germany after 1945 and thus play a key role in establishing the identity in West Germany.
In East Germany the reception was somewhat delayed. Admittedly in the early days of the GDR there were serious attempts to revive the Bauhaus tradition, but then Stalinism put a stop to this. The gradual rediscovery began in the 1960s and 1970s.

How would you like to make Bauhaus ideas productive for the present?

There are primarily three ideas upon which the sustainable effect of Bauhaus is based and that are important to me. First of all its interdisciplinary character, this decisiveness when it comes to bringing completely diverse disciplines together. Bauhaus has sought delimitation in many forms – between avant-garde and everyday, between the most diverse fields of work: an artist builds a house, an architect works in an aircraft factory. It is particularly within these hybridisations that significant Bauhaus innovations have come into being.
The second point is the social orientation of design, in other words the claim that living conditions in society can be improved through creative work. The third building block is being prepared to rethink radically, to cast aside all conventions. In an incredibly short time an extraordinary density of potential was explored in Bauhaus. This extreme desire and urge to experiment has never been achieved at this level again since.

What approach would you like to take for the specific implementation of these ideas? Which questions take priority for you in this?

First things first: the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is the largest Bauhaus successor institution – but it isn’t Bauhaus itself! Not for a variety of reasons. We aren’t a university of arts any more, working on creative tasks with the celebrity brains of their time. Other components also play a role: Dessau-Anhalt was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s and as a hi-tech region at the global forefront it was an important context for Bauhaus.
We are another institution, working under completely different conditions. Saxony-Anhalt is to a large extent a de-industrialised, shrinking region, and the situation from back then is not reproducible. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation today is mostly staffed by people with a research interest. We are working at the interface between research and design on two key tasks: preserving and communicating the historical legacy, and carrying on the Bauhaus ideas with themes, projects and questions relating to the present day. Probably the most pressing topic of our time is climate change. How do we have to design our environment in order to find an answer to the climate catastrophe? The Bauhaus methods and ideas can be applied very effectively to this question, they have not lost any of their contemporary relevance.

Using the theme of climate change as an example, could you explain how you would like to motivate social change?

Researchers, technicians, engineers and scientists are working in completely different individual areas on this theme, but it isn’t easily understandable for the general public. And the experts have detailed knowledge rather than an overall picture. Our job as an educational establishment could constitute precisely this area – bringing together existing knowledge, making it easy to understand and communicating it.
Social changes are based on fundamental reflection and transforming consciousness. I think the Bauhaus Foundation can contribute to this.

Another example is the connection between the financial market (crisis) and architecture. The Foundation is hosting a symposium on this topic under your direction in November. Why is it so important to you to entrench politics and economics in architectural theory?

Because these aspects are currently totally underexposed, and as a result we are coming across numerous architectural designs these days that lack any relevance. The fact is, hardly anyone considers how these designs are actually supposed to be implemented. This attitude of viewing architecture as an autonomous discipline is a legacy of Post-Modernism – and a fatal self-mutilation of the profession, because that keeps it out of central issues. It can be seen wonderfully from historical Bauhaus that the classical Modernist movement wouldn’t have been possible without political and economic innovations: finding and developing new financial models, founding co-operatives, local authorities controlling building works, all that was necessary to kick off the New Building movement.

What do you hope they will say at the end of your time of office as Bauhaus boss?

I’ve only just started. One thing is certain, that I will apply myself to the historical legacy and the communication of it – more intensively than has been the case in the Foundation until now. The relevance of the Bauhaus ideas lies in their combination of social engagement and cultural innovation. I want to keep this legacy alive.