With its programmes, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation offers a wide range of opportunities for artistic, scientific and research-based engagement with the heritage of the Bauhaus in Dessau as well as for education and mediation.
Bauhaus Lab
The Bauhaus Lab is an experimental format that studies and showcases a selected object from modern design history. The programme focuses on a specific object that is of interest because of its theoretical content: the interdisciplinary analysis of its material conditions, historical interconnections, speculative paths, and intellectual inspiration is in contrast to the unequivocal nature of the widespread historiography of modernity for it introduces the ambiguity and polyphony of possibilities of another version of the past and present. The three-month postgraduate programme is aimed at young professionals working in the field of architecture, design, and exhibitions. The exhibitions and publications developed during the course of the students’ joint research and field studies are a valuable contribution to an alternative, critical historiography of the Bauhaus and modernity.
Bauhaus Lab 2025
After modern brightness: Ecologies of light
During the Weimar Republic, the spread of artificial light led to radically new social ideas about the relationship between day and night as well as light and darkness, assigning darkness a place outside of what was modern and progressive.
At the Bauhaus, the light bulb itself became the model for the design of lighting fixtures; its technical form regarded as the most radical expression of functionality. However, the radiant glass building was embedded in a global structure of interconnected players in the lighting and electricity industry, above all OSRAM and AEG. Taking Marianne Brandt’s classic pendant lamp with a two-zone glass sphere as its starting point, the 2025 edition of the Bauhaus Lab examines electricity, from the Bakelite switches to the cables and connections to the power stations and infrastructures of the energy supply. The programme addresses the question of what the design of future lighting environments could look like – a design that helps to reduce the light pollution associated with omnipresent brightness and opens up new ways of interacting with darkness.
Details
Research field
Global Modernism Studies
Language
English
Duration
three months
Number of participants
up to eight
Target group
Scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, design, curating, and related disciplines
Conditions
Participation is free of charge, and all participants are given 24/7 access to workspaces in the Bauhaus Building. Participants will also receive a daily allowance of EUR 24.00. The programme includes field trips; travel and accommodation costs incurred during these excursions will be covered by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
Envisioned outcome
Collective exhibition in the Bauhaus Building as a contribution to the 2025/2026 anniversary programme of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
Up to and including the present day, the Bauhaus continues to be regarded as one of the most important institutions for artistic and design education. With the Open Studios – Teaching Models, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation builds on its educational legacy. Students and teachers from universities, art academies, and educational initiatives are invited to work in the historic Bauhaus workshops, developing and applying contemporary models of creative education. Themes shift between the past and the present, taking their inspiration from both the historic Bauhaus and contemporary debates on the training of designers.
Details
The preliminary course module of the Open Studios addresses the question of what significance the teaching models applied in the preliminary course at the historic Bauhaus have for the present day. Using selected student works taken from the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s collection, various historic assignments on the subjects of material, knowledge, and humankind are examined and transferred in a speculative manner. In this way, participants experience Bauhaus teaching in a multi-sensory way, and can compare it to current approaches in design education.
The preliminary course module can be conducted on site at the Bauhaus Building or digitally.
Language
English or German
Duration
2 to 7 days
Target group
International student groups in the fields of architecture or design, cultural studies or comparable degree programmes
Conditions
The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation provides a suitable room in the Bauhaus building free of charge and offers individually tailored academic support for the programme. Travelling, accommodation and material costs for the studio are to be borne by the participants themselves or financed via their university.
Provider
Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
Application period
possible all year round for university lecturers
Period of time
Spring and autumn
The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation welcomes applications for the programme. Please send your application or questions to: klaus@bauhaus-dessau.de
The modern understanding of design was nowhere more manifest than at the Bauhaus Dessau. Mistrusting outdated traditions of design, it replaced them with materials research and new relationships between technology, science, and craft skills. This basic approach of design through research is an appropriate starting point for interrogating the concepts of knowledge and future that are associated with design today. In the CO-OP design research degree programme, the concepts, approaches, and effects of design as a construct of diverse cultural, social, ecological, and political contexts and as a form of knowledge production are examined from various perspectives. This includes thinking about radical epistemological shifts in the self-understanding of designers and architects, critique, gaining distance from and analysing hegemonic Western design ideologies, and attempting to situate them in the context of contemporary discussions and practices of decolonisation.
Details
The one-year English language Master’s programme is an academic collaboration between the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Consisting of the three main modules Design as Research, Design as Education, and Design as Projection, the degree programme incorporates different formats of learning and teaching to foster exchanges between disciplines, working methods, and fields. In the second semester, students work on a Master’s thesis. The range of topics covered enables students to make contributions to international Bauhaus research. The programme is intended both as a preliminary step on the way to studying for a doctorate and as theoretical preparation for applied design research and practice.
Programme: COOP Design Research
Qualification
Master of Science
Language
English, thesis can also be written in German
Duration
two semesters (60 ECTS)
Contents
Design research
Target group
international students
Costs
tuition fees EUR 1,250.00 per semester
Admission requirements
Bachelor (240 ECTS) or Master’s degree in architecture or design, cultural studies, or comparable study courses or at least one year’s work experience
Provider
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with the Humboldt University of Berlin
Every year, over a hundred people from all over the world are directly involved in the various educational programmes of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation: The Bauhaus Study Rooms offer graduates of the Bauhaus programmes an opportunity to network and at the same time address an interested local and international public. They create temporary transversal learning spaces in which the conditions of collective knowledge production can be explored and experienced. In experimental workshops, round tables and tours, current issues of the foundation are discussed from the perspective of the various programmes.
2024: After Industry. Productivities of Transition
What comes after industry? How can structural change be organised in a socially and ecologically just way? The Bauhaus Study Rooms will take place in 2024 in cooperation with the Festival OSTEN in Dessau and Bitterfeld-Wolfen and are dedicated to the post-industrial conditions of design.
Schools of Departure – A digital Bauhaus atlas for co-editing
What knowledge do architects and designers need? How have study programmes, job profiles and curricula developed worldwide? The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has developed a digital atlas entitled “Schools of Departure” that seeks answers to these questions. The role played here by the Bauhaus and other prominent school experiments is reflected in the atlas in a variety of ways. In short portraits, photo essays, case studies, historical film sequences and journal articles, reform-oriented educational concepts that have shaped design education around the world over the last 100 years are brought together.
As part of a one-year project funded by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Digital Affairs of the State of Saxony-Anhalt in 2021 and a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, this digital atlas has been developing since 2022 as a constantly growing network that brings together research on the global interrelationships of the Bauhaus with other reform projects in design education in the 20th and 21st centuries. Instead of assuming the “influence” and the Bauhaus as a “centre” with movement into the non-European “periphery”, the atlas makes a variety of interdependencies and parallel developments visible.
The digital atlas depends above all on user participation: In the “Notes” online communication area, users are given the opportunity to edit content, supplement research and prepare data material. The digital atlas is aimed at students, teachers, academics, curators and Bauhaus researchers.
In addition, an annual e-journal will be launched in the atlas. The fourth issue of the journal “Machine learning” focuses on the relationship between design education and technology. The belief in knowledge, technology and progress emerged primarily in the second half of the 20th century in the form of a large-scale wave of cybernetisation in universities and research institutions. The journal contains historical and contemporary articles on particularly technology-orientated school experiments and designers and the different ideas they developed about machines.
The e-journals are published in the Digital Atlas in German and English and are published in a paperback edition by Spector Books Leipzig.
The current 4th e-journal on “Pedagogies of machine learning” is available online.
In a series of essays, interviews with contemporary witnesses, photographic and film documentation of archive materials, international school experiments are presented and mapped in the network. Modern mapping techniques create a dynamic spatial visualisation of data sets on art and design schools after the Bauhaus. They illustrate to users in which way, in which institutional forms and in which particular local or geopolitical context aspects of Bauhaus pedagogy were translated and thereby further developed. The design and programming of the platform was the responsibility of the “Offshore Studio” from Zurich. A graphic user interface was developed that is characterised by an experimental, at the same time memorable and intuitive design.
Consequently, the project can open up entirely new narratives on the cultural impact of the Bauhaus as a pedagogical model. Instead of assuming the “influence” of the Bauhaus and the Bauhaus as a “centre” with movement to the non-European “periphery”, the digital atlas makes the manifold interconnections visible.
Schools of Departure is aimed at students, teachers, academics, curators and Bauhaus researchers from Germany and abroad as well as at a general audience interested in culture. In addition to the open application on the online platform, the atlas will also be used in the educational programmes of the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Bauhaus Open Studios, Bauhaus Master Programme Coop Design Research, Bauhaus Lab). Within the framework of existing and future project collaborations, external young academics and students can also be invited on an ad hoc basis to edit content, supplement their own research and curate data material using the visualisation tool in order to generate thematic online presentations for the digital atlas. Thanks to funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the digital atlas will be supplemented by two editions of an e-journal as well as further educational modules.
The project Schools of Departure was funded by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Digital Affairs of Saxony-Anhalt as part of the Digital Agenda for the State of Saxony-Anhalt. Travelling Concepts: Art and Design Education Beyond the Bauhaus is being developed as part of “dive in. Programm für digitale Interaktionen” of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Minister of State for Culture and the Media (BKM) in the NEUSTART KULTUR programme.
