The Story Behind the Design

The inspiration

During the conceptual phase of the GoetheVRsum, we collaborated with employees, artists, technologists, and other creatives in workshops and brainstorming sessions to shape the virtual world’s design and experience. One of the ideas that emerged was to take Bauhaus as a starting point for the GoetheVRsum concept. Bauhaus is internationally recognized, synonymous with outstanding art, design and architecture and its avant-garde approach fits nicely to this innovative project.

The Studio für unendliche Möglichkeiten, who created the design of the GoetheVRsum, did a lot of research and selected three artists who have worked on the Bauhaus to be the key inspiration for the GoetheVRsum design: Gunta Stölzl, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. The works of the three artists are characterized by strong aesthetics that are constantly changing but unmistakable in their work.

From Textile Art to Digital Architecture

The entire outdoor scenery is inspired by Gunta Stölzl's work “Schlitzgobelin rot-grün”, an experimental carpet created in 1927 and 1928. Until then influenced by Johannes Itten's nature studies, she developed a clearer geometry that merged with flowing forms into a three-dimensional-looking tapestry. The appeal lay in the combination of a natural and an architecturally clear design language within the grid of a woven fabric. The virtual world of GoetheVRsum itself moves between these polar systems. It suggests a three-dimensional space with natural elements but is based on colourful crystal grids between glass panes. In addition, there is the differentiating materiality in Stölzl's work: the textures and processing techniques of the different materials, from the hard smoothness of the “iron yarn” to the almost unspun yarns of the more flowing surfaces, inspired the digital surfaces. For example, the long rectangles in the centre of the carpet were translated into a two-story building with columns, which we call the Lab. It has a large workshop area on the upper floor and four smaller rooms on the floor below. The wave-like patterns in the upper half of the image were implemented in the elevated seating areas. The zigzag pattern in soft colours can be found on the café's entrance walls. The multi-layered textile work and the collaborative weaving reflect our goal: a space for plurality and encounters to thrive.

A Walk-in Painting as a Community Space

Wassily Kandinsky also changed his synaesthetic artistic practice when he began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922: after his expressive period with Der Blaue Reiter and his encounter with Russian Constructivism, he began an increasingly complex analytical game of form and colour, of point, line, and surface. This “deconstruction” of the artwork in his language is also the design principle of the Café: elements of his works from the early 1920s are placed in the space and become part of an interactive three-dimensional work. When visitors enter the café, it is as if they are entering a walk-in painting. With these elements, new spaces can be “laid out” and put together into compositional variations, which is a basic principle of exhibition design. This vocabulary of forms and repertoire of colours, when brought into a three-dimensional space, unlock a new reality allowing visitors to have a multilayered experience.

The Avatars: Play, Perform, Become

If a virtual world is inspired by Bauhaus artists, then Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet cannot be missing. Not only can the entire GoetheVRsum be read as a “triadic” undertaking (with its trinity of movement, designed surfaces and sound), but it can also be read as a three-dimensional ideal of the “measured precision” with which Schlemmer distinguished himself from the contemporary expressionist dance. It was explicitly not designed for “robots”, but for “art figures” and with an unusual amount of aesthetic humour, so there could be no better design template. “If today's artists love machines and technology, if they want the precise instead of the vague and hazy, it is the instinctive rescue from chaos and the longing for creation.” (Schlemmer et al, 1925). In the GoetheVRsum, the Schlemmer-inspired avatars are playfully integrated into the world, only through interaction can visitors become one of them - an invitation to play, perform, and merge with the world.