Study Rooms 2025: Learning Environments

The Bauhaus Study Rooms 2025 set out from the Bauhaus Ecologies and dedicate themselves to environmental thinking in design. Together with partners, the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation invites discussions about the meaning of knowledge about nature and the perceived of its destruction for design practices. Lectures, presentations, workshops, and conversations present design concepts that test out paths to a future with more environmental justice.

The Bauhaus and some of the design schools of post-war modest that was founded as its successors contributed to the exploitation of the earth’s resources by forcing a culture of production based on growth and technological progress. At the same time, early environmental movements with their criticism of these models of progress and the risks to nature associated with them met with a respond in architecture and design as well. Collections and archives preserve memories of approaches in which nature becomes the model for design or design practices are guided by observations of nature.

Against the backdrop of the current debates on the climate crisis, the Bauhaus Study Rooms 2025 discuss the questions of the relevance of historical approaches for the present and what designers can learn from nature. Which alternative narratives, design practices, and forms of knowledge beyond the logics of appropriation and subjugation go hand in hand with that? Learning Environments. In the Workshop of Nature looks at inclusive and regenerative approaches in which the focus shifts to dependencies and interplay of human and non-human creatures and animate and inanimate corporations, and the concepts of welfare, empathy, and symbiosis become central.

In cooperation with the Hochschule Anhalt, the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity at Humboldt University Berlin, the MAO – Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana and the MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.