Provocative topic! Bauhaus feels so sterile, and industrial it's hard for me to think of something that could be further from what eco-restorative architecture and living communities might need to become: messy, inter-sectional, porous, biodegradable, nontoxic, all natural and organic (in the widest sense).
You say "... Davos Declaration 2018, which sought to work “towards a high-quality Baukultur for Europe” with a new, adaptive approach to the built environment that “is rooted in culture, actively builds social cohesion, ensures environmental sustainability, and contributes to the health and well-being of all.” <-- Right here is one consideration that we're already beginning to realize is key: it's not going to be enough to be merely sustainable, we must also be restorative, such as the work of Alan Savory Institute (more than 90 member locations around the world) and documentarian John D. Liu.
Regarding that question of Robin Wall Kimmerer poses in your quotation, "How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” This is exactly what folks like Manda Scott (Accidental Gods) and Robert Cobbald (Conscious Evolution) are asking us to take on - can we spend time every day considering "what would it be like if we got everything *right?*" And what could that lead us to in terms of ways of being and beginning to embody that future in stepwise fashion, starting now?
RICA looks amazing, and it makes me recall hearing Architect Bill McDonough;s talk regarding baseline design principles we need to take into account as he discovered them in a Bedouin tent: "After graduating from Dartmouth, McDonough helped put himself through architecture school at Yale by working weekends and summers as chauffeur to the bandleader Benny Goodman. Before entering graduate school, he went to Jordan to work on King Hussein’s Jordan River valley redevelopment project. “That changed me for life,” he recalls, “because I had the chance to live in a Bedouin tent. When I first got there, I looked at this tent made of goat hair and said, ‘They’re going to make me live in a black tent in this 120-degree heat with no shade, no air movement?’ But once I was in the tent, I discovered I was in deep shade, protected from ultraviolet light. The surface of the tent would heat up, and you’d get convective currents, so all of a sudden there was a breeze. The coarse weave was so open that the light came streaming in, so it was full of beautiful light to read by inside. When it rains, the hairs swell up, and it gets tight as a drum. And you make it from [a goat] that follows you around and eats everything you can’t.”
McDonough says he remembers thinking, How exquisite are these tents? “At the same time, we were helping the local tribes make adobe houses, which work under entirely different principles of thermal mass and diurnal cycles. The heavy brick moderates the temperature in ways that are totally effective for this place as well. So, I learned about mass and membrane and transparency from the tent and the adobe, and I saw that when you finish with them they return to the earth. The mud adobe hut is the earth; the tent will become compostable material.” from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2008/05/mcdonough200805
All of this to say, I'd love to be surprised by the New Bauhaus, but I'm also not sure that's the way we get there (declare new design principles via a school or movement). Listening to Bayo Akomolafe last week, he is among those who are asking us to just stop. Stop looking to the past or any existing institution, theoretical model, or aesthetic. He says "not backwards, not forwards, but awk-wards." Let us sit in the crossroads with the trickster, sitting in not knowing, and be willing to be surprised by the emergent. He says "Modernity is the paradigm of confinement and capture, let us dwell in ambiguity long enough to meet new gods who make new worlds possible."
Thanks for this Adam! This issue evoked some strong internal reactions for me, which means you’re poking in the right places. If you were to ask me before having read the article, I would have enthusiastically jumped at the idea of a new European Bauhaus dedicated to sustainability. After reading, I still think establishing an educational system with the intention of envisioning and creating a sustainable future holds a lot of potential, but I think some of the concerns you brought up need to be addressed for it to be successful. The theme that I see beneath the concerns your raised is the need to address the invisible as much (if not more) than the visible. What I mean by invisible in this context is the mental and emotional state from which we as individuals approach sustainability.
One concern you bring up is the intention of those in power. You point to the original Bauhaus when you say, “While Gropius reconceived the Bauhaus multiple times during the years 1915—1919 before it officially opened, the institution was inherently unstable because the political, economic, and social conditions both outside and inside it were highly volatile as well.” This example reminds us that an institution is a direct reflection of the individuals who make it up. In order to have a healthy institution, we need healthy people in it. I think that any community of individuals (especially those holding the authority of education) needs to have an element of inner work. If it were up to me, space for individual’s inner work would be integrated into the Bauhaus curriculum at the faculty, staff, and student levels as a way to help mitigate corruption and ego-driven agendas.
Another concern you rightly raise is the danger of approaching sustainability from a design approach. You raise the question, “Why is a new “sustainability aesthetic” needed, and how does that aesthetic reinforce our connectivity with nature rather than seek to design it through continued manipulation and obfuscation?” This surfaces the importance of our mindset when working toward sustainability. If we try to ‘design’ a sustainable future from the same anthropocentric perspective that got us in this mess in the first place, I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll be successful. In order to be successful in this transformation, it will require us to humble ourselves so we can let the wisdom of other species guide us forward.
Similar to the need to shift our anthropocentric mindset, when envisioning a sustainable future, we need to shift our relationship to the material world. You say it beautifully when you solidify your point that “A new sustainable aesthetic, such as there is one, needs to help us to envision a fuller life with less stuff.” This is essential for actually living in harmony with the rest of the planet, as sustainable growth is an oxymoron. We absolutely need to abandon our growth mindset if we want to step into a sustainable future. In order to do so, it will require deep inner work to find fulfillment and happiness from within instead of seeking it through material possession.
Overall, I think President von der Leyen’s intention of creating a sustainability focused Bauhaus is a step in the right direction. And as with most intentional change, it will require thoughtfulness, humility, and a willingness to do the inner work to pull it off.
I didn’t know about der Leyen’s op-ed, and it’s heartening to see a concerted effort and attempt at coordination at the highest level levels to address the climate crisis, and a framing of it in part in broader cultural terms. The evocation of the Bauhaus as a model is interesting, in part because it would be the kiss of death here in the United States — the shouts of socialism and elitism from the right and even center would be pathetically deafening — whereas in Europe it seems to hark back to idealism, solidarity, and artistic innovation which can potentially be harnessed towards political and policy ends. I do think it could be potentially useful, with some reservations, many of which you express.
My concerns would in large part center around organization — I think it’s easy to pay homage to something as innovative and iconic as the Bauhaus, and more difficult to implement it at scale with the coordination and support that’s needed to truly make a difference, and to trickle down to the actionable and political. Interdisciplinarity is a buzzword that can be hard to truly implement, especially at a larger level, and I think sometimes thrives in looser and non-hierarchical structures that are perhaps somewhat antithetical to the sort of urgent streamlined actions that’s needed on our timetable. Organizations like the MIT Media Lab, which I admire a lot, and could also be considered a model for the sort of innovative organization that’s needed, seems to, in my opinion, have a lot of research and work that ultimately just spins out into the ether. Translating zeitgeist — and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense — to a structure that yields concrete results seems daunting, albeit certainly possible, and most definitely worth pursuing. I guess after ambitious statements like this the key and big question is what comes next. “God is in the details” — someone relevant said that, right?
Beware the resurrectionists! I appreciate that you began with that crucial historical question: which Bauhaus does the EU hope to revive? Historical revivals are always inventions from a particular and highly political perspective in the present. Whether for the Bauhaus, the Arts +Crafts Movement, the New Green Deal, or any of the other projects aiming to reform the relation of art and life, technology and nature, social and economic prosperity, the elephant in the room is capitalism.
What would be the role of industry and corporations in the new Bauhaus? The danger here is the propensity for a range of win/win propositions and solutions steering public/private initiatives [as at Davos] with corporate innovations leading the way, and governments and "Baukultur" programs dutifully following their lead. The public/the commons/the planet is a third term, not at the table but central to the rhetoric as the entity to be served or saved.
What models of work and employment are imagined here, for a future of work aligned with potentially conflicting goals of economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental rehabilitation and stewardship? Would it simply be a continuation of existing models of production, where some elite workers are highly-trained artists, craftsmen, designers, and engineers within a system that relies on a much larger population of global workers continuing as an exploited precariat underclass? The danger is that we just end up with a new range of expensive niched infinitely customized “sustainable and socially responsible” designer products for elite “enlightened” consumers pursuing what can only be a limited model of designer wellness and self-improvement. Our collective conditions of life and ailing habitat are not altered by this, the privileged retreat to their more “authentic” decoratively greened bunkers while the old extractionism, exploitation, dispossession, displacement, and homelessness continue elsewhere.
To tackle our most urgent crises of social inequality and environmental destruction we will need an epic reimagining of how humans secure the conditions of life and approach the planet as a limited interconnected interspecies habitat. To do that we will need to grasp that economic prosperity is simply a means to the ends of collective social prosperity, and the latter is not achievable with the capitalist model of “accumulation by dispossession” [David Harvey]. It is hard to imagine that tech companies, product designers, artists, or a design school allied with industry, have the tools to bring about the overarching systemic changes needed to tackle the “social question of modern life in harmony with nature.” But I suppose it’s a start.
Provocative topic! Bauhaus feels so sterile, and industrial it's hard for me to think of something that could be further from what eco-restorative architecture and living communities might need to become: messy, inter-sectional, porous, biodegradable, nontoxic, all natural and organic (in the widest sense).
You say "... Davos Declaration 2018, which sought to work “towards a high-quality Baukultur for Europe” with a new, adaptive approach to the built environment that “is rooted in culture, actively builds social cohesion, ensures environmental sustainability, and contributes to the health and well-being of all.” <-- Right here is one consideration that we're already beginning to realize is key: it's not going to be enough to be merely sustainable, we must also be restorative, such as the work of Alan Savory Institute (more than 90 member locations around the world) and documentarian John D. Liu.
Regarding that question of Robin Wall Kimmerer poses in your quotation, "How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” This is exactly what folks like Manda Scott (Accidental Gods) and Robert Cobbald (Conscious Evolution) are asking us to take on - can we spend time every day considering "what would it be like if we got everything *right?*" And what could that lead us to in terms of ways of being and beginning to embody that future in stepwise fashion, starting now?
RICA looks amazing, and it makes me recall hearing Architect Bill McDonough;s talk regarding baseline design principles we need to take into account as he discovered them in a Bedouin tent: "After graduating from Dartmouth, McDonough helped put himself through architecture school at Yale by working weekends and summers as chauffeur to the bandleader Benny Goodman. Before entering graduate school, he went to Jordan to work on King Hussein’s Jordan River valley redevelopment project. “That changed me for life,” he recalls, “because I had the chance to live in a Bedouin tent. When I first got there, I looked at this tent made of goat hair and said, ‘They’re going to make me live in a black tent in this 120-degree heat with no shade, no air movement?’ But once I was in the tent, I discovered I was in deep shade, protected from ultraviolet light. The surface of the tent would heat up, and you’d get convective currents, so all of a sudden there was a breeze. The coarse weave was so open that the light came streaming in, so it was full of beautiful light to read by inside. When it rains, the hairs swell up, and it gets tight as a drum. And you make it from [a goat] that follows you around and eats everything you can’t.”
McDonough says he remembers thinking, How exquisite are these tents? “At the same time, we were helping the local tribes make adobe houses, which work under entirely different principles of thermal mass and diurnal cycles. The heavy brick moderates the temperature in ways that are totally effective for this place as well. So, I learned about mass and membrane and transparency from the tent and the adobe, and I saw that when you finish with them they return to the earth. The mud adobe hut is the earth; the tent will become compostable material.” from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2008/05/mcdonough200805
All of this to say, I'd love to be surprised by the New Bauhaus, but I'm also not sure that's the way we get there (declare new design principles via a school or movement). Listening to Bayo Akomolafe last week, he is among those who are asking us to just stop. Stop looking to the past or any existing institution, theoretical model, or aesthetic. He says "not backwards, not forwards, but awk-wards." Let us sit in the crossroads with the trickster, sitting in not knowing, and be willing to be surprised by the emergent. He says "Modernity is the paradigm of confinement and capture, let us dwell in ambiguity long enough to meet new gods who make new worlds possible."
Thanks for this Adam! This issue evoked some strong internal reactions for me, which means you’re poking in the right places. If you were to ask me before having read the article, I would have enthusiastically jumped at the idea of a new European Bauhaus dedicated to sustainability. After reading, I still think establishing an educational system with the intention of envisioning and creating a sustainable future holds a lot of potential, but I think some of the concerns you brought up need to be addressed for it to be successful. The theme that I see beneath the concerns your raised is the need to address the invisible as much (if not more) than the visible. What I mean by invisible in this context is the mental and emotional state from which we as individuals approach sustainability.
One concern you bring up is the intention of those in power. You point to the original Bauhaus when you say, “While Gropius reconceived the Bauhaus multiple times during the years 1915—1919 before it officially opened, the institution was inherently unstable because the political, economic, and social conditions both outside and inside it were highly volatile as well.” This example reminds us that an institution is a direct reflection of the individuals who make it up. In order to have a healthy institution, we need healthy people in it. I think that any community of individuals (especially those holding the authority of education) needs to have an element of inner work. If it were up to me, space for individual’s inner work would be integrated into the Bauhaus curriculum at the faculty, staff, and student levels as a way to help mitigate corruption and ego-driven agendas.
Another concern you rightly raise is the danger of approaching sustainability from a design approach. You raise the question, “Why is a new “sustainability aesthetic” needed, and how does that aesthetic reinforce our connectivity with nature rather than seek to design it through continued manipulation and obfuscation?” This surfaces the importance of our mindset when working toward sustainability. If we try to ‘design’ a sustainable future from the same anthropocentric perspective that got us in this mess in the first place, I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll be successful. In order to be successful in this transformation, it will require us to humble ourselves so we can let the wisdom of other species guide us forward.
Similar to the need to shift our anthropocentric mindset, when envisioning a sustainable future, we need to shift our relationship to the material world. You say it beautifully when you solidify your point that “A new sustainable aesthetic, such as there is one, needs to help us to envision a fuller life with less stuff.” This is essential for actually living in harmony with the rest of the planet, as sustainable growth is an oxymoron. We absolutely need to abandon our growth mindset if we want to step into a sustainable future. In order to do so, it will require deep inner work to find fulfillment and happiness from within instead of seeking it through material possession.
Overall, I think President von der Leyen’s intention of creating a sustainability focused Bauhaus is a step in the right direction. And as with most intentional change, it will require thoughtfulness, humility, and a willingness to do the inner work to pull it off.
I didn’t know about der Leyen’s op-ed, and it’s heartening to see a concerted effort and attempt at coordination at the highest level levels to address the climate crisis, and a framing of it in part in broader cultural terms. The evocation of the Bauhaus as a model is interesting, in part because it would be the kiss of death here in the United States — the shouts of socialism and elitism from the right and even center would be pathetically deafening — whereas in Europe it seems to hark back to idealism, solidarity, and artistic innovation which can potentially be harnessed towards political and policy ends. I do think it could be potentially useful, with some reservations, many of which you express.
My concerns would in large part center around organization — I think it’s easy to pay homage to something as innovative and iconic as the Bauhaus, and more difficult to implement it at scale with the coordination and support that’s needed to truly make a difference, and to trickle down to the actionable and political. Interdisciplinarity is a buzzword that can be hard to truly implement, especially at a larger level, and I think sometimes thrives in looser and non-hierarchical structures that are perhaps somewhat antithetical to the sort of urgent streamlined actions that’s needed on our timetable. Organizations like the MIT Media Lab, which I admire a lot, and could also be considered a model for the sort of innovative organization that’s needed, seems to, in my opinion, have a lot of research and work that ultimately just spins out into the ether. Translating zeitgeist — and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense — to a structure that yields concrete results seems daunting, albeit certainly possible, and most definitely worth pursuing. I guess after ambitious statements like this the key and big question is what comes next. “God is in the details” — someone relevant said that, right?
Beware the resurrectionists! I appreciate that you began with that crucial historical question: which Bauhaus does the EU hope to revive? Historical revivals are always inventions from a particular and highly political perspective in the present. Whether for the Bauhaus, the Arts +Crafts Movement, the New Green Deal, or any of the other projects aiming to reform the relation of art and life, technology and nature, social and economic prosperity, the elephant in the room is capitalism.
What would be the role of industry and corporations in the new Bauhaus? The danger here is the propensity for a range of win/win propositions and solutions steering public/private initiatives [as at Davos] with corporate innovations leading the way, and governments and "Baukultur" programs dutifully following their lead. The public/the commons/the planet is a third term, not at the table but central to the rhetoric as the entity to be served or saved.
What models of work and employment are imagined here, for a future of work aligned with potentially conflicting goals of economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental rehabilitation and stewardship? Would it simply be a continuation of existing models of production, where some elite workers are highly-trained artists, craftsmen, designers, and engineers within a system that relies on a much larger population of global workers continuing as an exploited precariat underclass? The danger is that we just end up with a new range of expensive niched infinitely customized “sustainable and socially responsible” designer products for elite “enlightened” consumers pursuing what can only be a limited model of designer wellness and self-improvement. Our collective conditions of life and ailing habitat are not altered by this, the privileged retreat to their more “authentic” decoratively greened bunkers while the old extractionism, exploitation, dispossession, displacement, and homelessness continue elsewhere.
To tackle our most urgent crises of social inequality and environmental destruction we will need an epic reimagining of how humans secure the conditions of life and approach the planet as a limited interconnected interspecies habitat. To do that we will need to grasp that economic prosperity is simply a means to the ends of collective social prosperity, and the latter is not achievable with the capitalist model of “accumulation by dispossession” [David Harvey]. It is hard to imagine that tech companies, product designers, artists, or a design school allied with industry, have the tools to bring about the overarching systemic changes needed to tackle the “social question of modern life in harmony with nature.” But I suppose it’s a start.