Towards a Bauhaus School Europe: Workshops for the Whole Earth

European online forum on education-oriented design making by Bauhaus Kooperation
What can we still learn from the Bauhaus today in light of the almost planetary challenges of designing our living environment? This is the question addressed by the “Workshops for the Whole Earth”, to which the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar invites people to the Bauhaus Dessau on June 4 and 5, 2021. This European online forum of design education is a contribution to the New European Bauhaus initiative of the European Commission—and the starting point for a European movement that develops building blocks for workshops of post-fossil, post-disciplinary design for schools, educational projects and universities.

The institutions working together in the Bauhaus Kooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar—the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar—are more than mere places for collecting, communicating and preserving the Bauhaus heritage. The comprehensive material legacies of the avant-garde school are an ideal basis for contemporary education, learning and information programmes, in which making and searching, tinkering and experimenting, researching and designing intertwine.

Just as the Bauhaus responded to the challenges of industrial modernity by founding a radical educational institution for design, with the workshop model being its basis, so today nuclei for alternative models of a socially and ecologically responsible production, fabrication and design are developing in Europe’s design, art and architecture schools. The urgent change in design thinking, which no longer understands nature as an exploitable silent resource and questions design as a hegemonic Western construct, begins in educational institutions. 

The “Workshops for the Whole Earth” forum, curated by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in charge of the Bauhaus Kooperation, is an invitation to discussion and exchange between a wide variety of transcultural educational initiatives, schools, programmes, and projects that associate a critical revision of the legacy of the European art school reform movements—which also included the Bauhaus—with a mission for alternative forms of design education in the 21st century. While their workshops were historically incorporated in the national competition for European and global dominance in the industrial age, which was based on colonialism and the ruthless exploitation of resources, the material-based educational experiments, which meet in the “Workshops for the Whole Earth” and which are oriented towards local resources and methods of making for the common good, present approaches to transnational ecological cultures of making.

The online event—developed together with international designers, researchers, architects and artists—is a prelude to further conversations with institutions, initiatives and stakeholders across Europe. The objective of these conversations is to have building blocks of a curriculum of “Workshops for the Whole Earth”, which in a way of a travelling experimental workshop will be linked up with and further developed at universities and initiatives, cultural institutions and academies all over Europe. The kick-off event in Dessau creates a platform of transcultural encounters of pluriverse post-disciplinary cultures of making and movements searching for the design of a different culture of nature.

Online workshops
–Taking up the thread.
Host: Aleksandra Kedziorek (Poland), curator (Polish Pavilion, London Design Biennale 2021) and design researcher

–Prototypes: new materials, open source and critical things.
Hosts: Katharina Mischler and Thomas Traxler (Vienna) Designteam, including curators of the Design Lab of the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) Vienna

–Do it yourself: making as collective self-empowerment.
Host: Basurama (Madrid), architects and artists collective

–The workshop as a biotope: designing material cycles and material flows.
Host: Marina Otero Verzier (Netherlands), Head of the Master program Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Director of the Research Department at the Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam 

–Botanizing on the asphalt.
Host: Friedrich von Borries (Hamburg), Professor of Design Theory at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, author and curator 

Information on the complete programme and registration can be viewed here.