Biology and Educational Models in the Pacific Southern Cone

●Edition 3: Moving Away

Article

David Maulen

Figure 1. Exercises in the “first trial year”
of the new Chilean School of Art in 1928.
Isamitt-Danitz family archive.

The Chilean encounter with second-order cybernetics in the early 1970s was an essential part of the modernization project the state had been promoting since the 1920s, a project which also encompasses the 1945 reform of the architecture school. But if one reviews the history of this project with greater care, one can identify the reform of the new art school of 1928, which was the product of a social movement that began after the First World War, and that was able to implement in the main school of art of the country, a “first year of trial” similar to the methodology of the Bauhaus preliminary course, influenced by the trends of the “Active” or “New” school of the time.

Between 1970 and 1973, Chile experimented with the Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) of what is known as second- order cybernetics, what one of its principle theorists Heinz von Foerster called the cybernetics of observing systems, as distinct from first-order cybernetics, which is involved in the study of observed systems. The interdisciplinary approach of VSM places emphasis on management and control systems from a biological and technological perspective, taking into consideration each of the components of the system as capable of making and executing decisions. It does not depend solely on a centralized unidirectional approach. The interactive design set in place for this project, carried out within the Chilean economic development agency of the Allende period known as the Corporation for the Promotion of Production (Corporación de Fomento a la Producción, CORFO), was strategic, and was chiefly the work of Gui Bonsiepe, a designer from the faculty of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG) who had relocated to Chile as a design consultant.

The basis of a VSM can be identified as possessing three elements: a decision-making space, the larger environment, and the technology that acts as the intermediary between the first two elements, but does not constitute the objective.

A VSM also possesses the intrinsic need to perform retrospective analysis to project future strategies. This approach has an analogical antecedent in the study of what was termed “Integral Architecture” in Chile, which became part of the new curriculum of study within the Faculty Architecture at the University of Chile in the 1940s. It too is thought of as possessing a number of variables defining its basis: the human being, nature and material. The work of Tibor Weiner, a former student and collaborator of Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus Dessau, and in the USSR of the early 1930s, was very important for the development of this curriculum, and with subjects like “Bio Architecture,” it helped consolidate a trend Chilean architects followed during the ensuing decades: the city designed as living organism.

The Chilean encounter with second-order cybernetics in the early 1970s was an essential part of the modernization project the state had been promoting since the 1920s, a project which also encompasses the 1945 reform of the architecture school. But if one reviews the history of this project with greater care, one can identify a third factor – the reform of the new art school of 1928, which was the product of a social movement that began after the First World War, and that in 1928 was able to implement in the main school of art of the country, a “first year of trial” similar to the methodology of the Bauhaus preliminary course, influenced by the trends of the “Active” or “New” school of the time.

In Chile, the moment of cultural transformation that began in the 1920s fed directly and indirectly the events of the 1940s and early 1970s. Using the models of organization of biology as part of the utopian ideals of artists, designers and architects tried to situate the development of human beings as intrinsically linked to their natural and social environment.

The “Active School” and “Vorkurs”

The vanguards of the 1920s proposed to radically reconstruct the comprehensive subject from scratch, as a critique of the nineteenth century brand of modernity which had brought on the First World War. In this context it is impossible to separate the creation of the State Bauhaus in Weimar and the foundation of the Weimar Republic, its constituent assembly and the preferential democratic social orientation of its early years. With regards to education, one of the main questions in this period was: what type of education should artists, artisans, designers and architects receive in order to serve as protagonists in the construction of this new society of the Weimar Republic?

On the one hand, the Deutscher Werkbund (a German association of artists, architects, designers and industrialists formed in 1907 with the intention of integrating the arts and crafts into mass industrial production in order to increase German competitiveness) had already established a precedent, defending the applied arts and making them pertinent for a new era, based on past references, and, on the other, the complementary development of a vanguard movement generically known as the “Active School” or “New School.” This educational model focused on the valorization of the cultural, social and environmental variables inherent in the generation of knowledge rather than the rote regurgitation (hence reproduction) of acquired information. According to this process, the student generates autonomous knowledge, independently analyzing different tendencies; a method which also strengthens teamwork. Several of the theorists of the Active school referenced psychology and biology (Núnez-Prieto, 2013) to bolster their argument for this form of integral learning which was inherently critical of nineteenth-century pedagogical models. Some of the Swiss and German exponents of this movement were extremely important to the Bauhaus (Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel, for instance) as well as to Latin American social movements, which proposed education in general and education in the applied arts in particular as a great device for societal transformation.

In the case of Chile, between 1920 and 1924 normal school teachers (the products of secondary schools organized around pedagogical training) and the Workers Federation of Chile (Federación Obrera de Chile – FOCH) organized alternative schools to the already existing state and private schools. These self-managed schools employed pedagogic techniques used by the Active School (developed by Pestalozzi and Fröbel, as well as methods designed by Maria Montessori, Ovide Decroly and Adolphe Ferrière).

After the First World War (even earlier in the case of México), throughout Latin America there were strong social movements demanding paradigmatic change. These movements focused on overcoming the colonialist structures that still defined Latin American economic policy in order to achieve a more just society for the majority of the population. In 1920, a President was elected in Chile – Arturo Alessandri – who promised to make great changes to achieve social justice, but in September 1924 he was forced to resign and enter into European exile, having not fulfilled his promises. He would return in 1925.

In March 1925, the same month as Alessandri’s return from exile to resume his duties as president, the normalist teachers’ movement in Chile, together with the FOCH, students, intellectuals and workers organized a conference in the municipal theater of Santiago de Chile to prepare a constituent assembly. The new constitution project included an educational reform based on the ideas of the New School. President Alessandri did not call for the assembly to be held, as he had promised from exile, but instead created his own constitution, affirmed by plebiscite in September of that year (he would leave office shortly thereafter, returning for a longer third term as President in 1932). In response, the teachers continued protesting and, when General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo assumed power in the spring of 1927, he called on the teachers in the Active School movement to carry out their reform throughout the Chilean educational system, including the transformation of artistic education. There are equivalences of this Chilean reform with the educational reform of Uruguay, carried out in 1927, and with the Brazilian reform movement of 1930 led by Lucio Costa.

In reality, General Ibáñez did not entirely understand the concepts of the Active School and was thinking instead of Mussolini’s corporatist model, whose hierarchical and centralized organization was contrary to Active School theories. The reform was abruptly interrupted eight months after it began. However, in 1928 the most avant-garde educational reform in Chile’s took place. As part of that reform, the old Academy of Fine Arts was integrated into the Ministry of Education, creating a reformed new school of art.

Between 1925 and 1926 the teachers’ movement sent the polymath Carlos Isamitt to research new methodologies used at the applied art schools of the European avant-garde. A very important normalist teacher, Isamitt was also an award-winning student at the Academy of Fine Arts, and the National Conservatory of Music, but also in 1918 he had presented the result of his anthropological research on using the geometric patterns found in indigenous art in the artistic education of children. After returning to Chile in 1928, Isamitt was appointed by President Ibáñez, following instructions from the normalist teachers leaders, to steer the reform of artistic education. That year he created a “first trial year” (Figure 1), similar to the Vorkurs at the Bauhaus or the first year at Vkhutemas in Moscow, having been exposed to the latter course at the Paris International Exposition of 1925. Isamitt also integrated elements from Polish, Hungarian, Austrian and Belgian avant-gardes, as well as the extra-artistic disciplines he had studied – including comparative social and historical anthropology, grammar and civic education – in order to address local and regional realities in South America.

With the implementation of a dictatorial regime in 1929, Isamitt’s reforms were interrupted and the progressive orientation in arts pedagogy he had instituted was eliminated from the local history of art for several decades. Despite this, a group of Chilean teachers continued promoting these ideas, and in 1936 published a book which included a visual projection (Figure 2) of the administrative, organic and self-managed effect of the proposals suggested in the 1920s.

Figure 2. Visualization published in 1936 by Chilean teachers of the Active School movement as an explanation of their ideas and experiences. Leonora Reyes Jedliky Archive.

The Integral Architecture Model and the city designed as a living organism

General Ibáñez was forced to cede power in 1931. Soon after, architecture students at the Universidad de Chile organized a series of strike movements in 1932–33, and again in 1938, where they demanded the university change its teaching models to better address the country’s problems. The reform movement of 1932–1933 achieved some successes – such as shared governance between professors and students, incorporation of new contents such as political economy, and the hiring of new professors who dealt with some points of the modern movement – but these modernizations were canceled in 1934 and several of the movement’s leading students were expelled. The student movement of 1938 did not succeed in changing the University, but some student leaders participated with their ideas in the Frente Popular (the left-wing coalition government which lasted from 1937 to 1941). Both the student movement of 1932–1933 and that of 1938 were inspirations to the movement of 1945. In 1942 the university created a professional order of architects, and in 1944 founded a Faculty of Architecture (an objective proposed at the Pan-American Congress of 1923), independent from the Faculty of Engineering. The 1945 generation triumphed where prior student movements had failed in their attempts to change the School of Architecture (in 1933 and 1938). In the following years, from 1946 until 1963, the university altered its study programs to follow the precepts of and inculcate students in Integral Architecture concepts.

In this period, the government’s plans for industrialization were directed by the aforementioned government agency, CORFO. Originally founded in 1939 by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, the role of CORFO as an incubator of technological modernization created an institutional disposition of a sort that would lead directly to the Cybersyn project in 1970, overseen by CORFO as well. It was also an influence for architecture students of the 1940s, who were searching for an ideology of architecture that would enable them to participate in the new industrialization promoted by the state, whose objectives of material and technological development did not preclude societal improvement.

The role of the architect Tibor Weiner was crucial in this situation (Maulen, 2015). As a student and then assistant to Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus Dessau (Maulen de los Reyes, 2019), Weiner would in the early 1930s join his teacher and mentor in the Soviet Union after Meyer formed the Bauhaus Brigade after his dismissal from Dessau in 1930. In 1933, Weiner left the USSR, and after living in Switzerland and France, he was able to secure a visa to Chile in 1939 after Pablo Neruda, then Paris consul of the Frente Popular government, managed to obtain asylum for him in Chile (Talesnik, 2019). In 1945 Weiner was included in discussions held by the students of the Universidad de Chile over formulating a new curriculum (Maulen, 2007). In this regard, student leader Abraham Schapira later stated explicitly that the ideas of the Active School (Barrenechea, 1999) should be part of this new approach. The interpretations that Hannes Meyer (Ulriksen, April 1946) had made of Johan Pestalozzi’s ideas to develop cooperative or collectivist methods of design were also implicitly present¹ – both with Weiner (Weiner, April 1946) and the young Chileans (Meyer, 1951).

The Integral Architecture model, which would influence the way in which architecture was taught and practiced in Chile during the following decades, is based on the relationship of human beings to the natural, cultural, social and economic environment (clearly inspired by Hannes Meyer’s functional, scientific approach to architectural design). Within this conception, technology is no longer the goal but solely a mediator of these relationships, with integral architecture projects developed through cycles of analysis and synthesis (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Basis of the new study curriculum of the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad de Chile from 1946. Dibam Archive and magazine Arquitectura y Construcción.

An essential contribution to integral architecture was “Bio Architecture.” Taught by Professor José Garcíatello, architecture students learned concepts of anatomy and biology, the idea being that students with knowledge of biology become capable of drawing an equivalence between the former and the design of architecture. At the same time, and in a complementary way, they investigated the functioning of the anatomy and its possible relation and equivalences within urban planning. This approach was reminiscent of the study of “the basic molecule of living” (the house), included in the Architectural Analysis and Planning course conducted alternately by Tibor Weiner and Abraham Schapira back in the 1940s. During the following 20 to 30 years, this approach contributed to an orientation that conceptualized the city “as a living organism.”² One of the best examples of this was the Santiago Inter-Communal Regulatory Plan (PRIS) of 1960 (Figure 4), although this was interrupted midway through the 1970s due to Pinochet’s coup and subsequent reorganization of the economy.

The Inter-Communal Regulatory Plan of 1960 was approved with the aim of guiding the future growth of the city. This instrument established urban-regional planning in Chile. It determined the limits of urban and suburban areas, defined industrial, green, infrastructural and residential areas, as well as addressing the problems of traffic and arterial circulation facing the capital through a system of structuring roads such as Américo Vespucio or the North-South Highway. Formulated by the architects Juan Honold, Pastor Correa and Jorge Martínez, it made a proposal of territorial ordering via horizontal expansion, with the implementation of a zone or strip enclosed by two territorial limits, urban and ex-urban. This territorial belt of agricultural, forestry and natural reserves (river beds, streams, etc.) formed a system of green areas (a green belt) between urban and rural areas. Its objective was to contain urban expansion and prevent conurbation with other neighboring urban centers (San Bernardo, Puente Alto, Maipú, Quilicura), while also creating a natural reserve to meet the recreational, cultural and aesthetic needs of the Greater Santiago area (Honold, 1966).

Figure 4. Santiago Inter-Communal Regulatory Plan (PRIS), 1960. Magazine AUCA Archive.

Organic Neo-Constructivism and Utopian Engineering

In their search for a new humanist paradigm endowed with an analytical and emotional dimension – in balance with the social and natural environment – the members of some avant-garde movements proposed overcoming the concepts of seventeenth century European linear (Newtonian) physics. The energy considerations of El Lissitzky, the organic constructivist stage of Vladimir Tatlin or Max Bill’s Moebius strip could be named as examples of this trend, as could the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil and other similar artistic orientations that arose in South America after the Second World War. An exceptional case is that of the Chilean engineer Abraham Freifeld. Around the same time, he proposed an organic neo-constructivism based on his reflections on the project of the city designed as a living organism – a conception in which he also integrated elements taken from the martial art aikido, Gestalt therapy and Einsteinian physics (in all its synesthetic variables). From these bases Freifeld developed a position on art integrated into the public space; a poetic structure using “utopian engineering.”³

Coincidentally, in the late 1960s Gui Bonsiepe (until 1968 a professor of design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung of Ulm, HfG Ulm) traveled to Chile, thanks to the support of the International Labor Organization (ILO), to support CORFO’s import substitution program (Medina, 2011). In 1970 he started directing CORFO’s technological innovation arm, Instituto de Investigaciones Tecnológicas (Chilean Production Development Corporation, INTEC-CORFO). At the same time the British management cybernetics specialist and second-order cybernetics theoretician Stafford Beer arrived at CORFO to support the industrial nationalization policy of the socialist government. Beer collaborated directly with Bonsiepe’s team, which was developing the interfaces necessary to aid in managing the national economy via a distributed decision support system – a real time information transmission system known as Project Cybersyn (or Synco – Sistema de INformación y COntrol – in Spanish). The basis of Beer's proposals was a Viable System Model (VSM) consisting of three basic elements – the decision space, the environment, and the technology generating the mediation between the two. In retrospect, this model can be seen as compatible with the of the Integral Architecture model antecedent of 1946, which also possessed three basic elements: the human being, nature and raw material (taking into account the technological possibilities – from the analogical possibilities that emerged after World War Two to the digital possibilities of the computer technology of the early 1970s.

The coup d’état of 1973 ended this organic society project. However, principles such as the recursiveness of autopoiesis – the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems (an idea developed by the biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, who also contributed to Beer and Bonsiepe’s work) – achieved a higher profile in 1974 thanks to the engineer Ricardo Uribe, who developed the Protobio computer program (Varela, 1974), anticipating the approaches of digital Bio Architecture. The final point of this process – in a subsequent economic and political context diametrically different from the developmental state in which their predecessors worked – is the Vir Det (Contreras, 2000) and “Oyster” antivirus software (Giacaman, 1994). Based on the workings of the immune system, this software was designed by the Chilean Miguel Giacaman between 1988 and 1994. It is the most recent link in a chain of bio-structural thinking in the Pacific Southern Cone that began in the early twentieth century. Such thinking has involved a specific epistemology, transformed and developed as a change of paradigms enmeshed in the relationships between art, science and technology, and situated within ongoing and evolving processes of social change.

The Bio Architecture of the second postwar period, the Active School of the 1920s, and the second order cybernetics of the early 1970s are similar in that each raises the question of the difference between modular structures and nodal structures. In a modular system, each element has a function, and the system operates through their interconnection. But if a module is missing, the structure does not work. In a nodal system, the model is that of a biological structure such as a cell or DNA. It is an ideal (utopian) system in which each node possesses all the functions of the system in power, and in case one node is missing, others supply their function. This biological schema, transferred to social, design and production structures, is based on a decentralized, independent and collaborative definition of operation. This same principle was summarized by Francisco Varela to explain the functioning of the immune system, as a model of the theory of autopoiesis. This same model informed Miguel Giacaman’s antivirus software, used in a practical rather than illustrative manner while designing the information architecture of the Vir Det, and the Oyster.

The retrospective lesson of this Chilean story is that there is a great difference between using technology and producing it.

Figure 5. “Ciclo elástico,” a Mobius strip by Abraham Freifeld (1963) created using sheet metal. Abraham Freifeld Archive.

Literature:

Barrenechea, Ana: A 53 años de la Reforma de 1946. Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Unpublished, report presented at the 150th anniversary of the teaching of architecture at the University of Chile, year 1999.

Contreras, Cindy: “Sistema de Control de Tráfico. El emprendedor Miguel Giacaman patenta su último invento.” Retrieved 10 June 2019, http://www.ceo.cl/609/article-2877.html

Giacaman, Miguel: National Television of Chile (TVN), “Enlaces,” 24 hour news/Imago Comunicaciones. Retrieved 10 June 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFJ32sR10go

Guttenberger, Anja: “The ‘School in the Woods’ as a Socio-pedagogical Ideal - Functional Analyses and Photographs by Peterhans.” Retrieved 18 June 2019, http://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/1380/the-school-in-the-woods-as-a-socio-pedagogical-ideal

Honold, Juan: “El Plan Regulador de Santiago,” in: AUCA n.2, 1966. pp. 31–40.

Maulen de los Reyes, David: “Bauhaus Networks in Latin America,” in: Georg Leidenberger and Bernd Hüttner (eds.), 100 Jahre Bauhaus. Vielfalt, Konflikt und Wirkung Metropol, Berlin 2019, pp. 117–31.

Maulen de los Reyes, David: “Necesidades sociales en vez de lujo. La influencia de la Bauhaus en la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Chile y el rol decisivo de Tibor Weiner en el nuevo plan de estudios y la metodología de análisis arquitectural,” in: Humboldt n.146, 2007, pp. 66–69.

Maulen de los Reyes, David: “Integral Architecture: Coop Design in Chile,” in: Bauhaus Magazine no. 7 (Collective), 2015, pp. 92–100.

Medina, Eden: “Constructing the Liberty Machine,” in: Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, The MIT Press, Cambridge and London 2011, p. 110.

Meyer, Hannes: “La Formación del Arquitecto,” in: Nueva Visión (Juventud Comunista de la Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Chile), 1951, pp. 3–8.

Núnez-Prieto, Iván: “Biología y educación. Los reformadores funcionalistas. Chile, 1931–1948,” in: Cuadernos Chilenos de Historia de la Educación n.1, 2013, pp. 65–86.

Talesnik, Daniel: “Moving Away to the Other End of the World. Reflections on the Letters Between Tibor Weiner and Hannes Meyer from the DAM Archive”. Retrieved 11 March 2019, http://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/4180/moving-away-to-the-other-end-of-the-world

Ulriksen, Guillermo: “Trayectoria del equipo Bauhaus,” in: Arquitectura y Construcción Chile, April 1946, pp. 56–58.

Varela, Francisco, Humberto Maturana & Ricardo Uribe: “Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model,” in: Biosystems n.5, 1974, pp. 187–96.

Weiner, Tibor: “Evolución de la Escuela,” in: Arquitectura y Construcción, April 1946, pp. 29–32.

●Footnotes

1 At the University of Chile in 1999, Abraham Schapira and a group of architects who had participated in the reform of 1945–1946, presented a collectively written document explaining the reform with a conference and lecture in celebration of 150 years of architectural teaching at the university. Within that explanation they pointed out that one of their fundamental references was the methodology of the Active School. This topic was further elaborated upon by Schapira in an interview with the author in 2006. Concurrent with the reforms in the School of Architecture, in 1946 Guillermo Ulriksen, a professor of architecture at the University of Chile, published an article in the Chilean magazine Architecture and Construction in which he detailed the Active School methodology used by Hannes Meyer in Dessau; in the same magazine Tibor Weiner published an article on the evolution of the school, referencing the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau designed by Meyer and a collaborative team of students (Guttenberger, 2018) and the influence of Johann Pestalozzi in Holland. In 1949, University of Chile architecture students published a definition of architecture inspired by Hannes Meyer as a collective work in the magazine Pro Arte, and then the communist youth of the Faculty of Architecture published Meyer’s article, “the formation of the architect” (adhering to Meyer’s Bauhausian affinity for exclusively employing lower case letters), which originally appeared in his newsletter New Vision. During the reform of 1928, Pestalozzi and other theorists of the Active School were mentioned in the magazine of the Chilean Ministry of Education, and this antecedent was a main source for later references to the Active School concept in the Faculty of Architecture reform of 1945. For example, Ventura Galván, professor of plastic composition during the reform of 1946, was a prominent student of Carlos Isamitt’s Vorkurs of 1928. The magazine of the Ministry of Education of 1928 had its office in the School of Art directed by Isamitt. The ideas of the Active School are also mentioned in the magazine ARQuitectura, published in 1935 by Waldo Parraguez and Enrique Gebhard, former student leaders of the School of Architecture of 1932–1933 who became professors in 1946.
2 In this sense, the influence of the new curriculum combined the knowledge of biology with the economy and the environmental context. In this orientation the young architects had passed to a new stage “post-Le Corbusier.” Their proposals were assimilated within the strategic planning of the Chilean Ministry of Urban Planning (MOP) beginning in the 1950s. The work Patrick Geddes, Patrick Abercrombie, Louis-Joseph Lebret, Lewis Mumford, Gaston Bardet and dialectic materialist philosophy were incorporated into their strategic thinking and institutional planning. In this context, the ideas of Tibor Weiner and José García Tello, in the application of biology to design was, in the broad sense of the concept, complementary.
3 Abraham Freifeld was an engineering student who in 1954 presented a thesis where he spoke of the need to create “alternative flows of energy” in the city’s circulation. He was subsequently hired by the Regulatory Plan team (PRIS) in the Ministry of Urban Planning and Public Buildings (MOP). In the 1960s he abandoned engineering, devoting himself to “neo-constructivist organic” art. He also proposed a critique of integral architecture, because, according to Freifeld, the concepts of physics, biology and other sciences, did not consider the advances of the “theory of unified fields” that characterized both the new physics of Albert Einstein and Fritz Perls’s Gestalt theory. While being interviewed on the UCV television program Derribando el Muro in 1983 he stated: “… when you do not let a constructivist build the world he begins to dream, at the limit of ‘great engineering,’ poetry and illusion are born, and that he calls ‘utopian engineering.’” Freifeld’s ideas were in fact quite close to the Russian Constructivist figure of the artist-engineer. (Minutes 4:52 – 8:53: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKH1vWcfFHw)

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The passenger ship Patris II transported the participants of the 4th International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) from Marseilles to Athens and back. Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy, travelling as a “friend of the new building movement” produced this half-hour soundless film as a travel journal. → more

May. 9 2018

●Article

Der CIAM-Protest — Von Moskau zur Patris II (1932)

Thomas Flierl

Entgegen allen internationalen Erwartungen – schließlich waren Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelsohn und andere eingeladen – befand sich am 29. Februar 1932 kein moderner Architekt unter den Hauptpreisträgern der ersten Wettbewerbsrunde für den Palast der Sowjets in Moskau. → more

Mar. 19 2019

●Article

A Migratory Life—from Dessau to Moscow to Mexico — Hannes Meyer and Lena Bergner and the Arts

Marion von Osten

In this article Marion von Osten focusses on the curatorial research involved in two of the project’s four chapters: Moving Away and Learning From. She rethinks the importance of the migratory life of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer and Bauhaus weaver Lena Bergner, starting with Meyer’s two-year directorship of the Bauhaus Dessau, the couple’s time working in the USSR (1931–1936), and, finally, their decade-long period as exiles in Mexico, which lasted from 1939 to 1949, the year they returned to Switzerland. → more

Mar. 3 2020

●Article

Die Sozialisierung des Wissens und das Streben nach Deutungsmacht — Lena Bergners Transfer der Isotype nach Mexiko

Sandra Neugärtner

Lena Bergner wird normalerweise als am Bauhaus ausgebildete Textilgestalterin charakterisiert. In ihrem zehnjährigen Exil in Mexiko widmete sie sich allerdings der grafischen Gestaltung, fast ausschließlich für antifaschistische Projekte. Eine Ausnahme sind ihre weitestgehend unbekannten Leistungen im Bereich der visuellen Kommunikation für das mexikanische Schulbaukomitee. Hier verwendete sie Otto Neuraths „Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik“ (Isotype). Dieser Text erörtert den Transfer der Isotype von Europa nach Mexiko am Beispiel von Bergner und ihren möglichen Berührungspunkten mit Neuraths bildpädagogischen Methode und untersucht, wie sich die Isotype von propagandistischen visuellen Kommunikationsformen abgrenzt. → more

Jul. 9 2020

●Interview

Praised, Sentenced, Forgotten, Rediscovered — 62 Members of the Bauhaus in the Land of the Soviets

Astrid Volpert, Anja Guttenberger

In this interview with Astrid Volpert, she reviews her decades of research on Bauhäusler who emigrated to the SU and makes it clear that there were far more than seven of them heading east. Persons traveling from the Bauhaus to Russia were from eleven countries. They belonged to various denominations—there were Protestants and Catholics, Jews and atheists. Of the 15 women and 47 men, only 21 of them were members of communist parties. → more

Nov. 23 2018

●Translation

The Moscow Bauhaus Exhibition Catalogue (1931)

Hannes Meyer

When Hannes Meyer had emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1930, one of the first things he did was organizing an exhibition about “his” Bauhaus. As early as in February 1931 Meyer had the exhibition Bauhaus Dessau. Period of Hannes Meyer’s directorship. 1928-1930 already ready to receive the Moscow public. It was shown at the renown State Museum of New Western Art. This is the first English translation of the exhibition catalogue. → more

Sep. 11 2018

●Article

After the Ball — Hannes Meyer Presenting the Bauhaus in Moscow

Tatiana Efrussi

Hannes Meyer arrived in the USSR just a couple of months after being dismissed from his position as Bauhaus director in October 1930. These months were filled with attempts by Meyer and his supporters to protest this decision through all possible means: media campaigns, open letters, student demonstration and court trials. After arriving in Moscow, Meyer carried on the fight against his unfair dismissal. → more

Sep. 17 2018

●Article

From Recognition to Rejection — Hannes Meyer and the Reception of the Bauhaus in the Soviet Union

Thomas Flierl

The history of the Stalinist critique of the Bauhaus and Hannes Meyer has two chapters. The first chapter spans the time from 1929 to the Architects’ Congress in the Soviet Union in 1937; the second consists in the condemnation of the Bauhaus in the GDR that took place on the trip by East German architects to Moscow in spring of 1950. This text tells the story of the first chapter. → more

Sep. 4 2018

●Article

Meyer’s Russia, or the Land that Never Was

Adrian Rifkin

It is quite hard to know where to start with Hannes Meyer in Moscow. It’s hard because, while there is plenty of documentation on him and his team in the Bauhaus Brigade—as well as other Western designers and architects (of these, Ernst May is at least as significant as Meyer, as is the Dutch designer Mart Stam, and each went on to produce more substantial work than Meyer after their respective Russian episodes)—the legacy of his work there presents certain difficulties in evaluating. → more

Sep. 10 2018

●Article

Moving Away to the Other End of the World — Reflections on the Letters Between Tibor Weiner and Hannes Meyer from the DAM Archive

Daniel Talesnik

This article examines the correspondence between a teacher (Hannes Meyer) and his former student (Tibor Weiner), who met at the Bauhaus in Dessau, going on to live for a period in the Soviet Union. Each migrated to Latin America shortly before the outbreak of World War Two, and returned to Europe in the late 1940s. The surviving letters between Meyer and Weiner, preserved in the DAM Archive in Frankfurt am Main, are not only a testimony of comradeship but also a window into some key moments in the first half of the twentieth century. → more

Mar. 11 2019

●Artists Work

Bauhaus in Russia — Haunted Houses

Tatiana Efrussi, Yuri Palmin

The following material was produced during the photographic workshop Bauhaus in Russia: Haunted houses, which took place in the framework of the exhibition bauhaus imaginista. Moving Away: The Internationalist Architect at the museum of contemporary art Garage in Moscow. Through an open-call we invited participants from several Russian cities to take part in the visual research on both the visible and invisible legacies of the “bauhauslers”. → more

Jan. 10 2019

●Artist Work

To Philipp Tolziner

Alice Creischer

For the exhibition bauhaus imaginista: Moving Away. The Internationalist Architect at Garage Contemporary Museum of Art, the contemporary artist Alice Creischer has been invited to respond to the personal archive of Bauhaus architect Philipp Tolziner. She produced reading of material relating to the architect’s socialist backgrounds and his work in the Soviet Union. → more

Sep. 11 2018

●Artist Work

Sketch One: Lotte and Hermina — Script-Reading and Screening by Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Wendelien van Oldenborgh

The script that the artist Wendelin van Oldenborgh created for bauhaus imaginista: Moving Away. The Internationalist Architect as a public moment is an insight into the development of her larger film project which will premiere as a contribution to the bauhaus imaginista exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, March 2019. It features archive material around the personas Lotte Beese and Hannes Meyer, Hermine Huiswoud and Langston Hughes. → more

Nov. 28 2018

●Article

Hamhŭng’s Two Orphans (To Konrad Püschel) — East German Internationalism in North-Korea Emerging through a Chronopolitical Lens

Doreen Mende

Doreen Mende’s work Hamhung’s Two Orphans, which borrows its title from a chapter of the cine-essay Coréennes (1959) by Chris Marker, proposes to trace the transformation of the Bauhaus’s relevance from its prewar internationalist modernity into elements of the GDR’s socialist internationalism when architecture operated as a state-crafting instrument during the global Cold War. → more

Oct. 29 2019

●Article

“All artists interlock!” — How Bauhäuslers created the “New Germany” and promoted the national economy

Simone Hain

The Third Reich was in ruins, the surrender not yet signed. An architect painstakingly working his way through the debris to the Schöneberg town hall found a sign on the door of the building authority with his name. Appointed to office by the German Communist Party (KPD), city counselor Hans Scharoun immediately looked around for his people: “I’ve looked everywhere for you, where are you? Here we go!” → more

Dec. 13 2019

●Article

The “School in the Woods” as a Socio-pedagogical Ideal — Functional Analyses and Photographs by Peterhans

Anja Guttenberger

The building theory classes at the Bauhaus focused on imparting a functional understanding of architecture. Building had become a science. As a result, the ADGB Trade Union School was designed logically from the inside out. Walter Peterhans’ photographs of the school images illustrate both the architect’s intentions for the building and the environmental studies conducted by Bauhaus students. → more

Jul. 30 2018

●Artist Work

Scenes from the Most Beautiful Campus in Africa — A Film about the Ife Campus

Zvi Efrat

Zvi Efrat, 2019, film stills from the exhibition video projection, 25 min, color, sound, English.
Courtesy of the artist. → more

Mar. 11 2019

●Article

The Legacy of Arieh Sharon’s Postcolonial Modernist Architecture at the Obafemi Awolowo University Campus in Ile-Ife Nigeria

Bayo Amole

The significance of Arieh Sharon’s postcolonial modernist architecture at Obafemi Awolowo University Campus at Ile-Ife is multi-dimensional. Built between 1960 and 1978, at first glance the campus core consists of an ensemble of modernist buildings. In this article Bayo Amole examines some of the physical and conceptual characteristics of the campus master plan and core area design in order to illustrate their significance as examples of postcolonial modernist architecture—identifying the most important aspects of their legacy, which has continued to guide the design of the campus as it has developed over the course of more than a half century. → more

Nov. 11 2019

●Article

Bauhaus Modernism and the Nigerian Connection — The Socio-Political Context of Arieh Sharon and the University Of Ife Design

Babatunde E. Jaiyeoba

It should be considered “against the run of play” for a Bauhaus-trained Israeli architect such as Arieh Sharon to have been named designer of the post-independence University of Ife. This paper examines how developments in the socio-political context of Nigeria and international politics—including history and policies in the education sector—“constructed” Sharon’s involvement in the University of Ife design and the spread of Bauhaus modernism to tropical architecture. → more

Jul. 5 2019

●Article

Nigerian Campus Design — A Juxtaposition of Traditional and Contemporary Architecture

Abimbola O. Asojo

The early to mid-twentieth century saw the International Style and modernism rapidly influence major Nigerian cities and towns, first as a result of colonialism and then independence. Discussing the architecture of two first-generation Nigerian Universities, the University of Ibadan and Obafemi Awolowo University, this article builds upon the established discourse concerning how architects assimilated the International Style into the tropical climate and sociocultural context of Nigeria. → more

Apr. 4 2019

●Article

Colonial Architecture in Ile-Ife

Cordelia Osasona

The architectural heritage credited to the colonial intervention of the British in Nigeria is a blend of features imported by Europeans accustomed to a temperate climate, mixed with adaptations derived from the principles of modern architecture and concessions to the region’s tropical climate. As such, colonial buildings of this era can be regarded as a hybrid architectural style. → more

Feb. 25 2019

●Article

The New Culture School for Arts and Design — Launched in 1995

Demas Nwoko

The New Culture School for Arts and Design in Ibadan, Nigeria has involved the development and construction of a space for creative people working in many different media in order to advance their professional proficiency in the fine arts, theater, music, film, photography, design, writing and more. → more

Aug. 19 2019

●Article

Nation Building through Campus Architecture — Israeli Architects Arieh Sharon and Eldar Sharon’s Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Campus in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1962–1976

Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler

The campus of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Nigeria, the first phase of which was built between 1962 and 1972, is a fascinating example of modernist architecture in Africa. As a case study of Africa’s assimilation of the modern style, its design is intriguing also due to the fact that it was built by Israeli architect Arieh Sharon (1900–1984), aided by his son, Eldar Sharon (1933–1994). → more

Feb. 18 2019

●Article

Beyond Cement and Iron — Contextualizing Israeli Architecture in Africa

Haim Yacobi

My focus on construction and planning is not incidental. These fields played a crucial role in space-shaping processes during the first decades of the Israeli state, as well as in the construction of the territorial identity of its new citizens. Simultaneously, during the 1960s, the modernist construction projects undertaken in African countries post-independence were also evidence of a desire amongst newly independent African nations for postcolonial national unity. → more

Mar. 11 2019

●Article

Tropical Architecture / Building Skin

Hannah Le Roux

Like the modernist architecture that preceded it, tropical architecture was co-defined with modern bodies and the bodies of the tropics: initially those of colonizers but soon colonized bodies as well. The technologies of tropical architecture, based on a modernist rationalism adapted to tropical climatic conditions, were, in turn, offered as a developmental asset to colonized subjects, especially young people. → more

Mar. 12 2019

●Article

A Hot Topic — Tropical Architecture and Its Aftermath

Marion von Osten

Both the tropical architecture discourse in general and British notions of modernism in particular were embedded in larger discussions on climatic and culturally sensitive approaches to building developed within the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne—CIAM) from the 1950s onward—notions rooted in the hygienic and medical discourses of colonial occupation. → more

Jul. 8 2019

●Article

The Extension Buildings of the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau — Documents of the Formalism Debate in the GDR

Anja Guttenberger

The former ADGB Trade Union School is regarded today as an icon of modern architecture. Designed at the Bauhaus under the direction of Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer together with the students of architecture, the building ensemble still stands as a paragon of collective work, reform pedagogical ideas and analytic architecture. Less attention has been paid to the extensions to the school, planned 1949–51 by Georg Waterstradt. These buildings stand as a valuable testimony to the vigor of GDR architecture. The “formalism debate” led to a rejection of Bauhaus architecture, and thus, the set of political-architectural principles exemplified by the Trade Union School. → more

Aug. 7 2019

●Article

Communistic Functionalist — The Anglophone Reception of Hannes Meyer

Richard Anderson

Philip Johnson described Hannes Meyer as a “communistic functionalist” whose most notable achievement was to have preceded Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as director of the Bauhaus. The position he assigned to Meyer was reinforced in the Bauhaus Exhibition of 1938 at MoMA. The particular view of the Bauhaus presented at MoMA in 1938 corresponds to the place of Meyer in the historiography of modern architecture in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. The view that Meyer’s work allegedly lacked aesthetic interest, rendering it irrelevant to an Anglophone audience. → more

Mar. 12 2019

●Article

Selman Selmanagić at the Crossroads of Different Cultures — From Childhood Years in Bosnia to Bauhaus Education and Travels

Aida Abadžić Hodžić

Selman Selmanagić’s childhood years in Bosnia, on the eve of the First World War, as well as his education in Sarajevo, Ljubljana and at Bauhaus Dessau between the two world wars, together with his work in Palestine and Berlin, shaped his worldview and experience with different cultures and traditions. Throughout his career, he perpetually strove to find contemporary answers for the challenges of the time he was living in. → more

May. 15 2019

●Article

The “Hungarian Bauhaus” — Sándor Bortnyik’s Bauhaus-Inspired Budapest School Műhely 1928–1938

Éva Forgács

One of the many Hungarians associated with the Bauhaus, painter and graphic designer Sándor Bortnyik (1893-1976) opened his art and design school, Műhely, in Budapest in 1928 to bring the Bauhaus’s sprit and some of its teaching methods into Hungary. Even if Bortnyik’s school did not have the scope of the Bauhaus, it was an efficient experiment in an independent form of institutionalized education in the field of modern graphic design and typography. → more

Jul. 27 2018

●Article

For the Faculty of Architecture at METU — Bauhaus was a Promise

Ayşen Savaş

“ARCH 101 Basic Design” is the title of the introductory course offered to the first-year students in the METU Faculty of Architecture (Middle East Technical University, Ankara). Since the establishment of the school, this course has been conducted with a very strong Bauhaus impact. → more

May. 15 2019

●Article

From Social Democratic Experiment to Postwar Avant-Gardism — Asger Jorn and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus

Michael Baers, Iris Ströbel

The project bauhaus imaginista would be negligent if it did not address the artist group referenced by its title, the Mouvement Internationale pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, or IMIB), founded in 1953 by Danish artist Asger Jorn together with a handful of French and Italian colleagues. Many of the theoretical and artistic positions advocated by the IMIB were developed dialectically in response both to the historical Bauhaus and the reconstitution of a Bauhaus-inspired pedagogical program at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm. → more

Aug. 12 2019

●Translation

Letter from Asger Jorn to Max Bill — February 12, 1954

Asger Jorn

Asger Jorn read of Max Bill’s plans for the new Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (HfG), a school modeled after the Bauhaus, in the British Architects’ Yearbook 1953, where Bill had placed a promotional article to attract prospective students and teachers. Excited by the possibility of participating in a new democratic pedagogical experiment and in pursuing his interest in fusing art and architecture, he wrote to Bill, inquiring about the role of art at Ulm and expressing his desire to secure a teaching position.

This is a translation of one of the letters Jorn send to Bill. → more

Oct. 15 2019

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