Table Of ContentList of Illustrations
Black- and- White Figures
Figure 1.1. Bauhaus masters on the roof of the Bauhaus building, 1926: Josef Albers,
Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-N agy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt,
Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger,
Gunta Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer. 5
Figure 1.2. Peer review in the round, roundtable with Ramia Mazé, Katja Grillner, Meike
Schalk, Maryam Fanni, Hélène Frichot, and Brady Burroughs, 2014. 17
Figure 2.1. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany, and the “Bauhaus Manifesto and
Program” published in 1919 by Walter Gropius. 26–27
Figure 2.2. Black Mountain College logo and Josef Albers’s drawing class, ca.
1939– 1940. 36–37
Figure 3.1. Krebs Cycle of Creativity I. 48
Figure 3.2. Krebs Cycle of Creativity II. 49
Figure 3.3. Krebs Cycle of Creativity III. 50
Figure 6.1. “A Pedagogy for a 21st Century Bauhaus, Silicon Valley.” 79
Figure 6.2. “A Pedagogy for a Postcapitalist Bauhaus.” 80
Figure 6.3. “A Pedagogy for a Bauhaus for the Anthropocene.” 81
Figure 8.1. Photograph from Methexis series, speculative studies by A(n) Office based
on balloon frame houses owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority. 98
Figure 8.2. Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood strategy for City of Detroit, study model
by A(n) Office. 99
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x List of Illustrations
Figure 8.3. Anni Albers, Untitled. 100
Figure 8.4. Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Effect of H-B omb on the Size and Distribution of
Cities,” 1955. 103
Figure 10.1. “SenseAura Hearing System,” from Parsons & Charlesworth, “Catalog for
the Post-Human,” 2014. 125
Figure 10.2. “Hed-T ek Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Headset,” from Parsons
& Charlesworth, “Catalog for the Post-Human,” 2014. 126
Figure 10.3. “NutriSys Nutrigenomic Vending Machine,” from Parsons & Charlesworth,
“Catalog for the Post-Human,” 2014. 127
Figure 11.1. Hello Kitty phone. 136
Figure 11.2. “iPhone girl.” 139
Figure 11.3. Japanese shimenawa for the New Year, handmade in ... well, that is the
question. 142
Figure 11.4. This sticker should not be understood to suggest that the box’s contents
were made in Taiwan. 143
Figure 11.5. Songshan culture and creative park and Huashan culture and creative park,
Taipei, Taiwan. 146
Figure 11.6. Interiors at Huashan Culture and Creative Park and at Syntrend Creative
Park. 148–149
Figure 11.7. Themed cafes based on the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and of
Taiwanese illustrator Jimmy Liao (at Huashan); a LEGO reproduction of Taipei 101
(at Syntrend); a hallway of an old factory converted into a movie theater lobby (at
Huashan). 150–152
Figure 11.8. A temple designed and built by the Ministry of Culture, located at the
National Center for the Traditional Arts. 153
Figure 11.9. Daily festival parade, National Center for the Traditional Arts, Taiwan. 154
Figure 11.10. Yilan Station; Jimmy Plaza. 155
Figure 12.1. Marianne Brandt, teapot, 1924. 163
Figure 12.2. Marianne Brandt, teapot, creamer, and sugar bowl, 1924. 163
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List of Illustrations xi
Figure 13.1. Andrew Bates inspects Dell Wine Jug of 1922 in 2017. 174
Figure 13.2. Marcel Breuer, Cesca Chair, reproduction of 1928 original by Knoll,
1980s. 176
Figure 13.3. Andrew Bates and Isabel Dec, Basis, vertical orientation, half-s cale model
of 2017. 177
Figure 13.4. Andrew Bates and Isabel Dec, Basis, horizontal orientation, half-s cale
model of 2017. 178
Figure 13.5. Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Wagenfeld Lamp, reproduction of 1923 original. 179
Figure 13.6. Yu-C hieh Ho and Maho Kohga, MaYu Light of 2017. 180
Figure 13.7. Christian Dell, Dell Wine Jug of 1922, 2017. 182
Figure 13.8. Siyuan Ma and Jennifer Peterson, Lynn Stand of 2017. 183
Figure 14.1. Risograph. 188
Figure 14.2. Risograph image remediating Lucia Moholy’s photograph of the Dessau
building. 190
Figure 14.3. Risograph image remediating Lucia Moholy self-p ortrait. 193
Figure 14.4. Risograph image remediating a photograph of the Dessau building in
1945. 194
Figure 14.5. Risograph image remediating a hollow cinderblock. 196
Figure 14.6. Risograph image remediating a photograph of the greenhouse at
Dessau. 197
Figure 15.1. Anni Albers, ca. 1960. 204
Figure 15.2. Anni Albers, Enmeshed II, 1963, lithograph. 211
Figure 16.1. Taeyoon Choi, Handmade Computer, 2013–2 017, custom electronics and
drawings. 218–219
Figure 17.1. Luiza Prado, Untitled 01, 2018. 226
Figure 17.2. Johannes Itten, The House of the White Man, 1921. 228
Figure 17.3. Luiza Prado, Untitled 02, 2018. 232
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xii List of Illustrations
Figure 18.1. N. Adriana Knouf, PIECES FOR PERFORMER(S) AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL
ENTITIES (2017– present). 243
Figure 18.2. N. Adriana Knouf, they transmitted continuously / but our times rarely aligned
/ and their signals dissipated in the æther (2018). 244
Figure 20.1. “Late Gothic Lock of a House at Visp, Switzerland.” 266
Figure 20.2. August Smart Lock Pro-L ocked. 268
Figure 21.1. Exhibition view of Moholy-N agy’s Emaille series, 1922, and his notice in
Der Sturm, 1924. 277
Figure 21.2. The Ostwald color system plates in Die Farbenfibel (The color primer),
1916– 1917. 279
Figure 21.3. László Moholy-N agy, EM 1 (telephone picture), 1923. 281
Figure 21.4. Back cover of exhibition catalog for “Art by Telephone” (a 33 rpm, 12-i nch
vinyl record), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 1969. 283
Figure 21.5. Atelier Van Lieshout, Almost Perfect (King Kong) chair, 2005. 285
Figure 22.1. Untitled (Woman [Lis Beyer or Ise Gropius] in B3 Club Chair by Marcel Breuer
Wearing a Mask by Oskar Schlemmer and a Dress in Fabric Designed by Beyer), c. 1926,
photo by Erich Consemüller. 292
Figure 22.2. Marcel Breuer, Stahlrohr-A rmlehnsessel (Club Chair B3), Bauhaus-
Fotopostkarte, 1925. 293
Figure 22.3. Elbo chair, 2017, Arthur Harsuvanakit and Brittany Presten of Autodesk’s
Dreamcatcher, generative design CAD system. 295
Figure 22.4. Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl, Afrikanischer Stuhl (African Chair),
1921. 298
Figure 23.1. Paul Klee, Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher- Maschine), 1922. 302
Figure 23.2. Front cover of Logic, no. 1, “Intelligence” (Spring 2017), cover art by
Xiaowei Wang. 304
Figure 23.3. Full cover of Logic, no. 3, “Justice” (Winter 2017), cover art by Xiaowei
Wang. 305
Figure 24.1. Wassily Kandinsky, Black and Violet, 1923. 315
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List of Illustrations xiii
Figure 24.2. Peter Keler, Cradle, 1922. 316
Figure 24.3. Walter Gropius, “Schema zum Aufbau der Lehre am Bauhaus, 1922.” 317
Figure 24.4. Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, part of the exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity”
at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, 1968. 318
Figure 24.5. Colloquy of Mobiles installation, May 2018, Interaction Design Master’s Pro-
gram, College for Creative Studies, Detroit; full-s cale replica of Gordon Pask’s origi-
nal design from 1968 by TJ McLeish, showing completed female mobiles and paper
mock-ups of male mobiles. 320
Color Plates
Plates 1–2 Pages from Parsons & Charlesworth, “The Catalog for the Post-H uman.”
Plate 3. Hello Kitty phone.
Plate 4. A themed cafe based on the work of Yayoi Kusama, Huashan, Taiwan.
Plate 5. A temple designed and built by the Ministry of Culture, located at the National
Center for the Traditional Arts, Taiwan.
Plate 6. Daily festival parade, National Center for the Traditional Arts, Taiwan.
Plate 7. Risograph image remediating Lucia Moholy self-portrait.
Plate 8. Risograph image remediating Lucia Moholy’s photograph of the Dessau
building.
Plate 9. Risograph image remediating a photograph of the Dessau building in 1945.
Plate 10. Risograph image remediating a hollow cinderblock.
Plate 11. Risograph image remediating a photograph of the greenhouse at Dessau.
Plates 12–13. Taeyoon Choi, Handmade Computer, 2013–2 017, custom electronics and
drawings.
Plate 14. Luiza Prado, Untitled 01, 2018.
Plate 15. Marshall Brown, Chimera, 2014.
Plate 16. László Moholy-N agy, EM 1 (telephone picture), 1923.
Plate 17. Wassily Kandinsky, Black and Violet, 1923.
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xiv List of Illustrations
Plate 18. The Ostwald color system plates in Die Farbenfibel (The color primer),
1916– 1917.
Plate 19. Colloquy of Mobiles installation, May 2018, Interaction Design Master’s Pro-
gram, College for Creative Studies, Detroit; full-s cale replica of Gordon Pask’s origi-
nal design from 1968 by TJ McLeish, showing completed female mobiles and paper
mock-ups of male mobiles.
Plates 20–22. Color in the urban environment: Alice Arnold, The Coca-C ola Sign at Two
Times Square.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our many contributors for their enthusiasm for this project,
especially on the ambitious schedule that allowed Bauhaus Futures to be published in
time for the 100th birthday of the Bauhaus school. We have learned so much from you
and your multifaceted perspectives. We are grateful for the financial support of Denis
Weil and the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Institute of Technology, Dan Martin
and the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, and Josh Kun and the
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern
California, all of which helped to make this book a reality. The late Walter Nathan, a
member of ID’s Board of Advisors for over 20 years, expressed excitement about this
project during its most nascent stage; he will be greatly missed. Martin Thaler, one of
the book’s contributors, taught a course called “Bauhaus Futures” in Spring 2017 at the
IIT Institute of Design, an inspiration for the title of this book. We appreciate the sup-
port of Joi Ito at the MIT Media Lab for his curiosity about the project, and are thankful
to Doug Sery and Amy Brand at the MIT Press for taking an interest in this book from
the beginning. Olaitan Awomolo joined us as a research assistant at the perfect time
and helped to pull the volume together.
Laura Forlano would like to thank Helen Nissenbaum and the Digital Life Initiative
at Cornell Tech and Urs Gasser and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
at Harvard University for providing vital and engaging communities during her sab-
batical year. Molly Wright Steenson wishes to thank her community at Carnegie Mel-
lon University. Mike Ananny wishes to thank Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences and the Berggruen Institute for fellowship support during
the volume’s preparation. Mike and Molly would like to thank Laura for hatching and
leading this project. And finally, we would all like to thank our life partners for their
support as we pursued the Bauhaus into the future.
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Introduction
Laura Forlano, Molly Wright Steenson, and Mike Ananny
What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today?
The excitement over new experiments with machine learning, drones, or genetic
material? The speculative futures imagined in the latest “climate fiction” novel or film?
The closing of thousands of retail stores and shopping malls? The power of new genres
of mass, computational propaganda? The role of private technology companies in
shaping social association and political mobilization? All of these concerns underpin
contemporary conceptions of aesthetics and ethics at the intersection of design, tech-
nology, and humanity, the central concern of the Bauhaus school. Where does a Bau-
haus approach live today? Who are the current pioneers of experimental laboratories
and practices? How do these sites reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? What are the
central questions of our time? And where might we be in another 100 years?
100 Years Ago: 1919
The Bauhaus—f ounded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919—w as an inter-
disciplinary and international school of design, described as an “experimental labo-
ratory for the building of the future.”1 While the school had only a 14-y ear tenure,
its influence can be found all over the world. It is best known for its integration of
research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its holistic under-
standing of the relationship between nature and technology; its commitment to the
democratization and affordability of well-d esigned products and buildings; its prag-
matic approach to collaboration with industry; and, its open-m inded, diverse, and
heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles. In fact, as this book
illustrates, despite the school’s widespread influence and legacy, there was no single
Bauhaus; a critical examination illustrates its varied multiplicity.
The Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933 under political pressure from the National
Socialists because the school’s international and universal appeals to good design posed
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xviii Introduction
challenges to the government. The Bauhaus faculty and students departed (often flee-
ing the Nazis) for over 29 countries—m ost notably to the New Bauhaus in Chicago
(now the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology) and Black Mountain
College in North Carolina, as well as the Red Bauhaus in Russia and the White City
of Tel Aviv, Israel. The school’s emphasis on simplicity, modularity, and minimalism
can be found in the design of everything from housewares, product design, furniture,
and even entire rooms (such as the Frankfurt Kitchen, part of the broader Neues Bauen
movement that coincided with the Bauhaus) to architecture, housing developments,
neighborhoods, and cities; from textiles and fashion to wallpaper and websites. In fact,
the Bauhaus’s mobility—m oving first from Weimar to Dessau in Germany, and then in
the United States and a global diaspora—a nd its ability to reconstitute itself in different
political and economic contexts and geographies serves as a precedent for today’s fluid
circulation of ideas, scholars, designers, and practitioners.
The Bauhaus is frequently used to frame the concerns of a particular point in time.
Among the many such frames, there is a Bauhaus of firsts (the first Weimar exhibition
in 1923, the first major US exhibition in 1938 at the Museum of Modern Art)2 in which
the Bauhaus represents the meshing of human and machine, design for mass produc-
tion, and what the 1938 Bauhaus 1919– 1928 MoMA catalog called a “new and modern
kind of beauty.”3 There is the Bauhaus of left-w ing politics, but also the Bauhäusler who
worked in some capacity with the Third Reich.4 There is the Bauhaus of emigration
and exile, as some Bauhäusler, including director Hannes Meyer, left Germany for the
Soviet Union, or fled Europe to the United States or other countries, as Xanti Schawin-
sky did. There is the resulting Bauhaus diaspora in the United States, Israel, Mexico,
and beyond, and the Bauhaus of institutions that followed in its wake, Black Mountain
College, the IIT Institute of Design, and twenty-f irst-c entury variants like the Interac-
tion Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. There is the Bauhaus Dessau, located in the former
East Germany, and the nuances it brought to the German history of industrial design.
And then there is the Bauhaus after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As envi-
ronmental remediation began around Dessau in the early 1990s, an ecological reading
of the Bauhaus was born that reflected concerns of environmental writers and green
thinkers. This particular history extended beyond the Bauhaus itself, connecting the
history of Siedlungen (housing developments) to the city planner and landscape archi-
tect Leberecht Migge, a proponent of subsistence farming. The Bauhaus of women,
many of whom were largely ignored throughout Bauhaus history, are now getting their
due through a series of exhibitions and publications, not least at the Bauhaus Archiv
and Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin. And there is the Bauhaus as a reflection of Ger-
man history itself, as Kathleen James-C hakraborty notes.5
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