Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus.
What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus.
Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology.
Contributors
Alice Arnold, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Marshall Brown, Stuart Candy, Jessica Charlesworth, Elizabeth J. Chin, Taeyoon Choi, B. Coleman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael J. Golec, Kate Hennessy, Matthew Hockenberry, Joi Ito, Denisa Kera, N. Adriana Knouf, Silvia Lindtner, Shannon Mattern, Ramia Mazé, V. Mitch McEwen, Oliver Neumann, Paul Pangaro, Tim Parsons, Nassim Parvin, Joanne Pouzenc, Luiza Prado de O. Martin, Daniela K. Rosner, Natalie Saltiel, Trudi Lynn Smith, Carol Strohecker, Alex Taylor, Martin Thaler, Fred Turner, Andre Uhl, Jeff Watson, Robert Wiesenberger
Laura Forlano is Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is also Director of the Critical Futures Lab. She is the coeditor of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press).
Molly Wright Steenson is K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is also Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts. She is the author of
Architectural Intelligence (MIT Press).
Mike Ananny is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the author of
Networked Press Freedom (MIT Press).
Laura Forlano is Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is also Director of the Critical Futures Lab. She is the coeditor of
From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press).
Molly Wright Steenson is K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is also Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts. She is the author of
Architectural Intelligence (MIT Press).
Mike Ananny is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the author of
Networked Press Freedom (MIT Press).
Joi Ito is Director of the MIT Media Lab, where he is also Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences. He is the coauthor of
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future.
Carl DiSalvo is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jeffrey Bardzell is Professor of Informatics in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington.
Shaowen Bardzell is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Design in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington.
Daniela K. Rosner is Assistant Professor in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, where she codirects HCDE's Tactile and Tactical Design Lab.
B. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is Faculty Director of the C3 Game Culture and Mobile Media initiative.
Robert Wiesenberger is Critic at the Yale School of Art, where he teaches the history of graphic design, and a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University. As the 2014-2016 Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, he was responsible for the museums' Bauhaus collections.
