The Bauhaus Was a School

What is the opposite of a Wagenfeld lamp? Enrol now for the famous Bauhaus ‘Vorkurs’ in our interactive exhibition in the temporary bauhaus-archiv and exercise your creativity.

The Bauhaus was a school of art and design that did many things differently. An important innovation was the VORKURS  – a preliminary course which all students were required to complete. The experience students gained in exercises was deemed far more important than the material results.
Now it is your turn to learn by doing. For the interactive trail we reinterpreted historic exercises by Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers and paired them with contemporary tools and notions. Hopefully you will not only take away an impression of what it was like to be a Bauhaus student, but leave something behind as well.

the bauhaus was a school
27.11.2019 – 09.05.2020
the temporary bauhaus-archiv / museum für gestaltung
Knesebeckstraße 1-2 | Berlin-Charlottenburg
Mo–Sat, 10–18 hrs | Free entry
A project by the bauhaus-archiv / museum für gestaltung
Project idea: Friederike Holländer, Nina Wiedemeyer
Concept: Rose Apple, Friederike Holländer
Exhibition design and production: Alex Valder
Exhibition graphics: Rose Apple
Organisation: Juliane Bethge
with students of the Nelson-Mandela-Schule, Berlin  
 

Design Skills for All!

Design skills for all! Learning to take things into your own hands is useful – especially so in Berlin, where the Bauhaus Agents asked me to help a class of 10th grade students facilitate wayfinding in their school. Continue reading “Design Skills for All!”

Modell Bauhaus

The exhibition shows the development and influence of the legendary school on it’s 90th anniversary. With about 1.000 exhibits, it is the biggest show on the Bauhaus so far.

MODELL BAUHAUS | BAUHAUS. A CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 22.7.– 4.10.09
Direction: Omar Akbar, Annemarie Jaeggi, Philipp Oswalt, Hellmut Seemann
Curators: Ulrike Bestgen, Werner Möller, Lutz Schöbe, Michael Siebenbrodt, Wolfgang Thöner, Klaus Weber
Architecture and exhibition graphics, media architecture, printed matter, book design: chezweitz & roseapple
Photos: Volker Kreidler

Publication on the exhibition in Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin: The book re-examines and re-evalutes the art school´s history and influence.

MODELL BAUHAUS | BAUHAUS. A CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Hatje Cantz, 2009, 376 pages, 302 illustrations, 236 in colour, hardcover with book jacket (English and German editions)
Editors: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Klassik Stiftung Weimar
Graphic Concept, layout, typesetting: chezweitz & roseapple

Related Post: Navigating Bauhaus

Navigating Bauhaus

My favourite graphic designer in the Bauhaus is László Moholy-Nagy. Graphic design was just one of many areas he was working in, and his layouts often seem a trifle inelegant and akward. But when it comes to translating ideas into graphic compositions, he is the boldest and the most inventive and engaging. He is trying to tell you something and he wants you to UNDERSTAND that something. That is because he could be your great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1895.

People often write about how contemporary and relevant the Bauhaus still is and how it’s cultural legacy can be found everywhere around us, which is probably correct, at least in the case of Germany. But while working on the graphic interface of the 90th anniversary Bauhaus Exhibition, I was more interested in pin-pointing the difference between now and 90 years ago.

Light-Space-Modulator by László Moholy-Nagy in the Modell Bauhaus Exhibition

One important difference I found, lies in the changed relationship between designer, content and audience. Whereas László Moholy-Nagy is one with his content and comes up real close to deliver his message into your face, the contemporary designer keeps a distance. He doesn´t shout, he doesn´t arrange his words for maximum impact, but to strict grammatical rules. He wants you to understand the underlying sentence structure first, the words second. He designs systems in which content is arranged, and then lets you draw your own conclusions.

The contemporary designer not only keeps a distance to the content and the audience, but also to his own work and the idea of authorship. The thing that appeals to him in using systems is the element of chance. Graphic systems can be programmed to generate an aesthetic almost by themselves. They work like a bit like a Graphic-Meaning-Modulator, you feed some parameters into it and out comes a visual surprise. Here are our parameters for the 23 panels guiding the visitor from the inner Central Hall of the Martin-Gropius Bau into the outer exhibition ring.

  • Every panel depicts a key object shown in the exhibition room the panel is guiding to, as a technical drawing.

 

  • A chromatic circle runs over all 17 panels. The background colour of each panel is determined by its position in the great hall.

 

  • All key objects occupy roughly the same size on the panel. The pixel ratio of the background is determined by the original size of the key object.

And now press start and see what happens:

 

Navigation System for the exhibition:
MODELL BAUHAUS | BAUHAUS. A CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Klassik Stiftung Weimar
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 22.7. – 4.10.09
exhibition design and graphics by chezweitz & roseapple.
Photos of the exhibition by Volker Kreidler

More about the exhibition here: Modell Bauhaus