International Summer School  90/09
Date: 22nd – 31st July  2009

To mark the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation invites students from all over the world to a “Bauhaus Visiting School“, which will take a fresh look at the buildings of classical modernism in Dessau. The Bauhaus buildings traverse the city like a “golden thread”, which begins in the south with the experimental Törten estate and ends in the north with the Kornhaus, a venue for day-trippers on the Elbe. As such, the Bauhaus buildings are remarkable representatives of a radical process of modernisation during the city in the early decades of the 20th century. The buildings indicate complex innovative thrusts in Dessau, which would have been inconceivable without prominent personages such as the social democrat Mayor, Fritz Hesse, and the entrepreneur and aeronautical pioneer Hugo Junkers. Apart from the Bauhaus buildings, Dessau has numerous other residential and industrial buildings, which were built in the spirit of the modern movement.

Repeatedly re-shaped by destruction and reconstruction, the physical structure of the city continued to change throughout the 20th century. The social transformation brought about post-1990 by reunification, the collapse of industry and demographic change have forced Dessau to reposition itself in general.

The Bauhaus has returned to the centre of public attention: the city aims to promote itself both locally and externally with the “Bauhausstadt” (“Bauhaus City”) brand. This applies not only to the physical layer of buildings, but also to a mentality, which has defined the city. This provides the key to coping with structural transformation today.

Many Bauhaus buildings have now been renovated in line with the precepts of monument protection and opened to the public. The rediscovery of the Dessau-born composer Kurt Weill as seen in the annual Bauhaus Festival is again one of the city’s attempts to brand Dessau as a city of classical modernism.

If one approaches Dessau from the perspective of the images developed for the city, the Bauhaus City has much in its favour. That the controversy about the “Bauhaus City” has remained a focus of public attention makes it abundantly clear that the unambiguous images hide very different ideas of what Dessau could be as a “Bauhaus City”: a centre of innovative architecture, a pre-eminent educational landscape, a place for creative entrepreneurship?

The “Bauhaus City” opens up a fascinating field of tension, where epoch-making history and local stories, iconic designs and lived-in architecture coexist in real locations.

With the Summer School, we wish to invite young artists and architects, urban planners and designers from all over the world to Dessau to explore the contiguities, relationships, rejections and misunderstandings that make up the Bauhaus City as a physical space, an idea, an echo of the past, and as a concept. In six topical workshops held on-site, performances, visual displays and urban interventions accrue, where hidden traces and connections are brought to light, critique is offered on urban situations, and contradictions are revealed. The Summer School also aims to contribute in doing so to a redefinition of the relation between Dessau and the Bauhaus.

Regina Bittner, Concept and Project Director