{"id":3476748,"date":"2019-04-26T12:55:51","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T12:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3476748"},"modified":"2019-04-26T12:55:52","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T12:55:52","slug":"re-wilding-the-bauhaus-what-its-foundation-course-should-be-like-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2019-04-26\/re-wilding-the-bauhaus-what-its-foundation-course-should-be-like-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-wilding the Bauhaus: What its Foundation Course Should be like Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

To mark its centenary this year, the Bauhaus has published<\/em>\u00a0Design Rehearsals: Conversations About Bauhaus Lessons.<\/a>\u00a0It\u2019s a fascinating account of an experimental design education that, shaped by the traumas of the First World War, sought ways to deal with the advent of mass society and the rise of the machine. As the book\u2019s editors put it, \u201ca generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn carriages now stood in the open air amid a landscape in which nothing was the same\u201d. One hundred years later, contributors to the book were shown some of the images created at that time and asked, \u201cWhat do you see? How would you qualify this approach today?\u201d My contribution \u2013 a response to images from Oskar Schlemmer\u2019s class on \u2018The Human\u2019 \u2013 is below.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bauhaus<\/p>\n

The Man portrayed in these images is a lonely one.<\/em><\/p>\n

A preoccupation with the human being as an autonomous subject must have felt liberating at the time \u2013 but today these images remind us of what we have lost: a sense of connection to each other, and with the living world.<\/p>\n

Situated and embodied experiences that once gave us meaning \u2013 a sense of interdependency with living systems \u2013 are replaced in these images by abstraction and ecological indifference.<\/p>\n

The sadness triggered by these images can be productive: they contain the seeds of a\u00a0Vorkurs<\/em>, or Foundation Course, to replace what has been lost.<\/p>\n

This course would foster ecological literacy, and a whole-systems understanding of the world.<\/p>\n

It would reunite two worlds that have been sundered: wisdom traditions from other places and times, and the latest insights of systems thinking and complexity science.<\/p>\n

The course would expose students to complex interactions between life-forms, rocks, atmosphere, and water. It would help them discover that the entire Earth is animated by interactions among systems at different geographical and temporal scales.<\/p>\n

The experience of mapping biotic communities would teach them that everything is connected \u2013 from sub-microscopic viruses, to the vast subsoil networks that support trees.<\/p>\n

Art, in the new course, would ensure that students connect with living systems emotionally, and not just rationally.<\/p>\n

By making students curious about \u201cwhat we\u2019re inside of\u201d, in the words of Nora Bateson, art would teach students to explore complex interdependencies with joy \u2013 even when they remain perplexed.<\/p>\n

By making them aware of the power of small actions to transform the bigger picture, art would also foster activity \u2013 not just awareness, or introspection.<\/p>\n

Many core elements of such a course already exist. Pockets of vitality can be found wherever students are attentive to the relationships between living organisms and their environment.<\/p>\n

Ilya Prigogene described such experiments as \u2018small islands of coherence\u2019 in an otherwise chaotic world. http:\/\/thackara.com\/notopic\/industrial-production-is-not-the-purpose-of-life\/<\/p>\n

Caring for life \u2013 and its interdependence with the nonhuman world \u2013 is a new source of value on these islands.<\/p>\n

And because ecological practice involves new ways of thinking about connection, patterns and context, the new course would bring designers quite naturally in contact with adjacent disciplines such as climatology, hydrology, geography, psychology, history, and many more.<\/p>\n

No textbook for the new foundation course exists \u2013 which is probably just as well. The course is better thought of as a journey, than as a body of knowledge.<\/p>\n

The journey is neither short, nor easy. Its destination cannot be known in advance. No pathway has been laid to ease our way. And the autonomous individual is no longer the focus of the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks\u201d writes\u00a0Gloria E. Anzald\u00faa<\/a>\u00a0for whom life-centered design could as well be thought of as weaving, as walking. \u201cWe humans need to be nepantleras \u2013 bridge builders and reweavers of relationality\u201d.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Design Rehearsals: Conversations About Bauhus Lessons\u00a0<\/a>is edited for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation by Katja Klaus and Regina Bittner. The book includes texts by: Ludowig Balland, Stefani Bardin, Jan Boelen, Anna Bokov, Otto von Bush, Clare Butcher, Alison Clarke, Laura Forlano, Corinne Gisel, Susanne Hauser, Carolin H\u00f6fler, Tom Holert, Tim Ingold, Joachim Krausse, Marion von Osten, Nina Paim, Judith Raum, Tai Smith, Gabrielle Schleijpen, Wolfgang Sch\u00e4ffner, Sam Thorne, John Thackara, Franciska Z\u00f3lyom.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Teaser photo credit: By Ralf Herrmann<\/a> – selbst fotografiert am 17. September 2006first upload to de: 20:53, 17. Nov. 2007 by de:User:Typografie.info, CC BY-SA 2.0 de<\/em><\/p>\n

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No textbook for the new foundation course exists \u2013 which is probably just as well. The course is better thought of as a journey, than as a body of knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3476751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,79718,79720,213535],"tags":[167391,163844,150410,94158],"class_list":["post-3476748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-environment","category-society","category-society-featured","tag-alternativeeducation","tag-buildingresilientsocieties","tag-holisticthinking","tag-systemsthinking"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3476748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3476751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3476748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3476748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3476748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}