Bauhaus Futures

Hardcover | 18.75 x 2.92 x 23.65 cm | 376 pp

MIT Press | 2019 | 9780262042918

Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus.

What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who re-inscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus.

Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus - its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratisation of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles - remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability.

Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology.