Discourse | Cracks | Narrative

Across three thematic blocks, the iconic building will be scrutinised in the lectures and panel discussions. The findings could result in model practices for taking care of the Bauhaus Building in future. At the same time, they are an invitation for debating contemporary architecture in dialogue with the architectural heritage of the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus Anniversary 2026 will explore the material foundations of the iconic building with three exhibitions in the historic workshop wing of the school building, which have been less considered in the history and reception of the Bauhaus. Steel, glass and concrete were considered pioneering building materials for modern industrial society at the time. Whilst their cultural implications and charge of meaning have been examined and addressed many times in the architectural history of modernism, the economic, geopolitical and ecological contexts of these materials have remained unconsidered. Today, the buildings of classical modernism, of which the Bauhaus Building in Dessau is considered an outstanding representative, have become problematic, precisely, because of their materiality. The “lightness” of the building, which was praised in the 1920s, was part of a long debate about a new form of architecture, which also linked the new industrially manufactured building materials with a completely new form of space as a built expression of a society determined by the dynamics of mechanization. At the same time, it is precisely these industrially produced materials, based on the overexploitation of ecosystems and natural resources, that celebrated their triumphant advance in the construction industry of the 20th century and contributed massively to the growing damage to the climate and environment, the planetary consequences, we are confronted with today. The production sites and global trade routes of these materials, which are often interwoven with colonial exploitation structures, have also been ignored.

By looking at the Bauhaus materials, the conference aims to contribute to a new perspective on the narratives of architectural modernism. This is not only about knowledge that has been ignored by historiography, but also about a general readjustment of the discipline.

For some years now, architects, architectural historians and theorists have been striving to decenter their discipline. While the architectural history of modernism was determined by the canon of a history of the designing architects and their buildings, multidisciplinary research approaches now examine architecture as a field of collaborative practice of the interaction of the most diverse actors, economies, matters, types of knowledge and technologies. With the decentration away from the object of the building towards the process of making and the activity of the materials within the production of architecture, buildings become relevant not as fixed but as dynamic structures of the interaction of climate, soil, different material cycles, energy flows and power relations. This also includes their pre- and afterlife, the landscapes and ecosystems that were destroyed for the extraction of building materials, the mountains of rubble, piles of debris and material stores that house the buildings that have become obsolete.

The Bauhaus Matters conference will explore the iconic building in depth in three thematic blocks. The term ‘Matter’ deliberately has multiple connotations: ‘Matter’ in the sense of questioning its current cultural and social relevance, but also as a physical material activity that includes its processuality and changeability. These conceptual facets are permanently present in the Bauhaus Building: e. g. in the tensions between concrete ceilings and stone wood floors, which can be seen in the cracks in the floor, in the building research archive as a reservoir of the cycles of materials, economies and technologies, within which Bauhaus buildings underwent changes, and in the various narratives and attributions of meaning with which the building made of glass, steel and concrete is still conveyed today.

The conference thus proposes new perspectives on the material artifact of the Bauhaus and on this basis sees itself as an invitation to negotiate approaches for contemporary building. The conference asks which concepts of material and matter have determined the discourse on the physical aspects of building to date? And what strategies of building as a co-production of material cycles, energy flows and ecosystems could look like from the criticism and distancing from static concepts of architecture as a final product turned to stone?