Discourse | Cracks | Narrative Bauhaus Matters: Materials of Modernism, Dessau
Steel, glass, concrete – the Bauhaus Building was celebrated as the agent of a new idea of architecture. Since then, the Bauhaus Building has occupied a key position in the narratives of modern architectural history. Today, window fragments, plaster remnants, pipes and tubes in the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation's construction research archive tell the story of the production, use, ageing and destruction of this building. The conference Discourse | Cracks | Narrative Bauhaus Matters: Materials of Modernismtakes the tension between these narrative spaces as the starting point for an international debate. It examines the ideologies and knowledge regimes that contributed to the formation of the modern architectural narrative. Looking at the events and activities of buildings, it also proposes a change of perspective in the discipline: from objects to processes to the ecologies of building in the present.
Speakers included architecture scholars, historians and practitioners: Santiago del Hierro, Karola Dierichs, Kim Förster, Kathleen James Chakraborty, Hannah le Roux, Katie Llyod Thomas, Philipp Misselwitz, Simon Mitchell, Monika Motylińska, Robin Rehm, Robert Stock, Florian Wüst, and Albena Yaneva.
Simon Mitchell presented the paper «Minor Histories from Minor Parts» and drew upon a range of archived Bauhaus building fragments across a series of ethnographic vignettes to discuss the fluctuating and contingent value of a monument par excellence. The edited volume To the Core. Bauhaus Dessau 100 is forthcoming December 2026.
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