Bauhaus is turning one hundred. The iconic German art school first opened its doors in 1919, in Weimar, and was shut down just fourteen years later, when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Over the course of its brief life, it became synonymous with modern design. It stripped furniture and building façades of ornamental frills, and its minimalist aesthetic set the tone for architecture around the world. By the middle of the century its imprint could be seen everywhere from Japan to Israel to Yugoslavia—though perhaps nowhere is it so visible as in the United States, where many of the artists and architects who studied and taught at the school, a number of whom were Jewish, fled in 1933.

Today, the “International Style” that Bauhaus popularized is viewed with more ambivalence: on the one hand, it gave us austere masterpieces like Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, and on the other, it led to the soulless corporate blocks that make so many downtowns look identical. In any event, Bauhaus’s function-first ethos still has a devoted following, in Asia as much as in Europe or the Americas. And even though a century has gone by, it may still have something to teach us today. That’s the thinking behind a recent series of workshops held in Shanghai to mark the school’s 100th anniversary.

Sponsored by the Department of Culture and Education of the German Consulate General in Shanghai, the workshops were organized by Shen Qilan, a Chinese curator, educator, and writer who maintains close ties to Germany, where she completed her doctorate in philosophy. “Bauhaus is an outstanding intellectual tradition, but it’s not often talked about here,” says Shen. She organized the events with two aims. “First, to introduce people to the existence and value of the Bauhaus tradition. And second, to ask what that tradition has to do with our current moment in 2018 or 2019. Often we see things from 1919 as documents, as something from the past. Yet Bauhaus, I firmly believe, is relevant to the present.”

The workshops began in the spring, with a series of four sessions titled Bauhaus Class 1.0. “Shen Qilan invited several prominent scholars from the Chinese cultural scene,” says Oliver Hartmann, head of the Department of Culture and Education. “The first class was really successful: there were 100, 120 people sitting there drawing, working with fabrics, being creative, learning from Chinese experts about Bauhaus.” That success led them to organize Bauhaus Class 2.0, a longer set of six classes in the fall. “The first course focused on Bauhaus’s past, and the second one focused more on its legacy,” he explains. “The second course also had a practical dimension, because we did city walks: students went outside to experience and compare buildings, and they also visited our experts in their studios.” Both courses filled up quickly with people from a variety of backgrounds who shared little more than an interest in design—at least one parent even brought a child. Students who attended all four classes in the spring, or all six in the fall, and successfully completed the homework, received a certificate.

Still, what does Bauhaus have to do with Shanghai, a city that after all is better known for its art deco treasures and its postmodern skyscrapers? As Shen explains, Bauhaus had an important, albeit indirect, influence in China. “The most profound impact it had was on architectural thought. Of course there wasn’t any direct influence, because no Chinese students studied at the Bauhaus, but its thinking was passed on,” she says.

When the Bauhaus school opened in 1919, at the start of the interwar period, German society found itself in the midst of radical economic and political upheavals. “It was a time of large-scale industrial production, and society as a whole was figuring out how to respond, in thought, in art, in culture, in design,” says Shen. Bauhaus responded with designs that prioritized efficiency above all else: from high rises to chairs, its forms are sleek and linear, reduced to their core elements. “What’s fascinating is that, at a time of momentous change, a group of particularly independent-minded people came to use their own means to address problems raised by the society and the times.” They offered an elegant visual language for a newly industrialized world.

One hundred years later, artists and architects face a different context and a different set of challenges. For one thing, cities today are vastly bigger than they were in 1919, as Shen readily acknowledges. “Today in Asia, cities with populations in the tens of millions are normal. With tens of millions of people, how do you design housing, how do you design offices, how do you design streets? The spaces we live in are totally different.”

Yet that doesn’t mean that Bauhaus is no longer relevant. “We can’t use products designed by the Bauhaus to meet our current needs,” Shen explains, “but the school’s thought, its belief in responding to the needs of the times—that’s something we can use in the present.” 

Both courses, Bauhaus Class 1.0 and 2.0, used the philosophy of this design tradition to look at the urban environments. One class, led by Bu Bing, turned students’ attention to the street just outside the cultural center, Middle Shandong Road. Students spent time watching the street, sought to understand it, and then invented their own symbolic system to respond to it. “You first observe the street, then you condense it to a symbol. You can capture this symbol in a photo, you can respond through dance, you can draw a map.” For students and teachers alike, this requires looking at a familiar environment with fresh eyes. “You have to look at the street again, this short stretch of road that’s only 400 meters long. We found that not one person had ever looked at it so closely.”

The Bauhaus workshops are part of a varied array of courses, exhibitions, film series, talks, and other events that the German consulate puts on in Shanghai. Shen sees these as an important platform for cultural exchange, where people can learn not just about a particular topic but about different modes of thought. “Germany has a very important tradition of kritisch zu sein, that is, being critical. If you say something, I won’t just agree with it—I’ll analyze it and maybe say that 70% I agree with, 30% I doubt,” she says. “They really respect intellectuals.” Both Hartmann and Shen stress the importance of making sure these exchange go both ways, so that people in the West can learn about China.

Shanghai is a few months ahead of the curve in celebrating the Bauhaus centenary. In 2019 events will take place around the world to commemorate the school, most notably a series of exhibitions called Bauhaus Imaginista. Shen is excited for so many people to learn about this tradition, whose life was a short as it was transformative. “Everyone can experience the power of art to change your life,” she notes. “That’s part of Bauhaus.”

Website: goethe.de/shanghai
WeChat: AKuB_Shanghai

Contributor: Allen Young
Photographer: David Yen
Additional Images Courtesy of Goethe Institut China