Study Rooms 2025: Learning Environments

The Bauhaus Study Rooms 2025 are dedicated to environmental thinking in design. Together with partners, the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation invites participants to discuss the significance of knowledge about nature and the awareness of its destruction for design practices. Lectures, presentations, workshops and discussions will introduce design practices and concepts that explore ways towards a more environmentally just future.

The Bauhaus and the design schools founded in its wake during the post-war modern era contributed to the exploitation of the Earth’s resources by forcing a production culture based on growth and technical progress. At the same time, early environmental movements, with their critique of these models of progress and the associated threats to nature, also found resonance in architecture and design. Collections and archives preserve memories of approaches in which nature becomes a model for design or design practices are guided by observations of nature. At the same time, these knowledge-producing repositories are themselves specific ecosystems: this applies to their climatic conditions, conservation practices and systems od order, all of which must be critically examined today.

In the context of current debates on the climate crisis, the Bauhaus Study Rooms 2025 discuss the relevance of historical approaches for the present and what designers can learn from nature. What alternative narratives, design practices and forms of knowledge beyond appropriation and subjugation are associated with this? ‘Learning Environments: In the Workshop of Nature’ looks at inclusive and regenerative approaches that focus on the interdependencies and interactions between human and non-human beings, as well as living and non-living entities, and where concepts of care, empathy and symbiosis take centre stage.

Language: English

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