Bauhaus Clouds. Challenges to the Nebula of Architectural Histories and Archives

CCSA Topics 3

Edited by Oliver Elser, Daniela Ortiz dos Santos, Carsten Ruhl

Contributions by Almut Grunewald, Anke Blümm, Bruno Maurer, Carsten Ruhl, Daniel Talesnik, Daniela Fabricius, Daniela Ortiz dos Santos, Ita Heinze-Greenberg, Karen Koehler, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Rixt Hoekstra

92 Seiten/ pages
19,5 × 30 cm
Gestaltung/ Design: hla.studio, Leipzig
76 farbige und schwarz-weiße Abbildungen/ 76 color and black and white images
Broschur/ Softcover
Englisch/ English
M BOOKS, Weimar
1. Auflage/ 1st Edition, 2025

ISBN 978-3-944425-16-0

https://doi.org/10.21248/gups.85781

https://www.m-books.eu/store/bauhaus-clouds/

The Bauhaus as we know it did not exist. It is actually a complex of clichés, unilateral interpretations, ideological appropriations, misunderstandings, tendentious receptions, and historical narratives. Not surprisingly, it was celebrated as the most important art school of modernity’s heroic age, while simultaneously documenting quite the opposite: the degeneration of art and architecture in the age of capitalism. «Bauhaus Clouds» takes such approaches as a point of departure for action. On the one hand, it addresses the constructs of new narratives that place architectural archives at the center of the Bauhaus debates. It begins with the understanding that archives and architectural collections are neither crystallized nor neutral statements. On the other hand, it investigates the degree to which architectural narratives and measures affecting the idea of the Bauhaus have influenced social constructs of past experiences in the current process of architectural culture, as well as society’s relationship with building culture at large.

«Bauhaus Clouds» is the result of conversations initiated in the CCSA Bauhaus lectures performed in the auditorium of the DAM between 2018 and 2019. The book has been conceived as a series of critical essays that aimed at repositioning Bauhaus historiography and the institutional collections of architectural records. Proceedings of the Bauhaus Lecture Series of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture (CCSA), a research cluster between the Goethe University of Frankfurt, the Technical University of Darmstadt and the Deutsches Architekturmuseum.