Teaching

After modern brightness: Ecologies of light

In his 1963 autobiography, Richard Buckminster Fuller criticised the Bauhaus for only having concerned itself with ‘problems of modification of the surface of end products’, for never dealing with the installations hidden inside the building’s walls.

With more than 300 light bulbs installed throughout the building, the Bauhaus in 1926 resembled a glowing glass structure. Electric lighting was both a medium and a material, and served as a convenient device to conceal the infrastructures and flows of electricity. Furthermore, the proliferation of artificial light gave rise to radically new social conceptions of the relation between day and night, light and dark, and assigned darkness a place outside of what was considered modern and progressive.

At the Bauhaus, the light bulb itself became a model for the design of lighting fixtures; its technical form was considered the most radical expression of functionality. However, the radiant glass house was embedded in a global geography of interconnected players in the lighting and electricity industry, above all OSRAM and AEG. Taking Marianne Brandt’s classic pendant light with a two-zone glass sphere as its starting point, the Bauhaus Lab 2025 investigates the felectrical current from the bakelite switches to the cables and connections, to the power plants and infrastructures of power supply.  The programme not only takes up Fuller’s critique, but also asks what the design of future lighting conditions might look like—a design that helps to contain the light pollution associated with ubiquitous brightness, and opens up new ways of interacting with darkness.

Call for applications

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation welcomes applications for the programme. To apply, please send a CV, a portfolio, and a letter of interest (in English) to Dr Regina Bittner, head of the programme, by January 19, 2025: lab [​at​] bauhaus-dessau.de. All application documents should submitted as a single PDF file; documents with file sizes exceeding 10MB should best be shared via download link.

The selection process consists of two stages: First, an international jury will select a number of applications to be shortlisted; these candidates will then be invited to Zoom interviews with the programme team. Shortlisted candidates will be notified by February 1, 2025 and interviews will take place shortly thereafter.

Questions regarding the application and selection process, as well as the programme itself, can be directed to the email address mentioned above. We particularly welcome applications from candidates with profiles that have hitherto been marginalised in academic and cultural institutions of the global north. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will endeavour to assist with visa formalities for applicants from outside the Schengen area.

Prof. Regina Bittner, PhD
Project leadership
bittner@bauhaus-dessau.de

Philipp Sack
Project management
sack@bauhaus-dessau.de

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.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation welcomes applications for the programme. Please send your application or questions to: klaus@bauhaus-dessau.de

Prof. Regina Bittner, PhD
Project leadership
bittner@bauhaus-dessau.de

Katja Klaus
Research associate
klaus@bauhaus-dessau.de

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

You can apply either via Uni-Assist or via the SSC portal of Anhalt University of Applied Sciences. If you have any questions regarding your application, please contact: info@coopdesignresearch.de

Prof. Regina Bittner, PhD
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
bittner@bauhaus-dessau.de

Prof. Stephan Pinkau Graduate Engineer
Anhalt University of Applied Sciences
info@coopdesignresearch.de

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.

Vera Lauf, PhD
Research associate
lauf@bauhaus-dessau.de

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.

Katja Klaus
Project managers
klaus@bauhaus-dessau.de

Philipp Sack
Research associate
sack@bauhaus-dessau.de