Known for its experimental pedagogical program and for its role in shaping modernist agendas in architecture and design, the Bauhaus and its legacy occupy a contested terrain.
In its fourteen years, the school challenged many established paradigms: craft production was central in its pursuit of manufactured, reproducible objects; architecture was reconceived in its social aims and for its techno-scientific bases; and art permeated the educational curriculum, becoming entangled in nearly all aspects of the spiritual and material life of the school’s masters and students. And yet, the Bauhaus did not represent a radical break with the past: it built on centuries-long histories of color theory, study of fundamentals, and education through bodily reform.
From these potentialities came collaboration and opposition, euphoria and disappointment. The school was an incubator more than a definitive achievement. How is the legacy of the Bauhaus to be understood a century after its founding? Putting laudatory celebration to one side, how do contemporary architects look back to the Bauhaus—as a myth, as a model, as a warning, or as a mere episode among the many comprising twentieth-century modernism?
Bringing Los Angeles- and Berlin-based architects together for an afternoon of conversation, Bauhaus Looking Forward seeks to identify past challenges and possibilities that might be recognized as present among current practices.