Bauhaus colloquium web archive is online
The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s International Bauhaus Colloquium is now a renowned international conference on current questions of the history and theory of architecture. This format first began to help reappropriate the heritage of Bauhaus in 1976. An internal web archive created for the 2019 Bauhaus anniversary year, available at www.bauhaus-kolloquium.de/archiv, now offers an overview of the history of the fourteen international Bauhaus conferences and documents the conference’s complex history and importance.
The website reflects the development of the Bauhaus colloquium over its four decades of existence. Before the major political changes of 1989, the colloquium was somewhere that speakers could use the officially endorsed Bauhaus reception to test the expanding limits of what could be expressed under a slowly disintegrating authoritarian regime. After 1989 it remained an academic forum to discuss and communicate knowledge about the fate of Bauhaus items and individuals, archiving and conservation initiatives, and questions of the history and theory of architecture and its links to politics.
The web archive stems from the exhibition at the 13th International Bauhaus Colloquium in 2016 curated by Prof. Dr. Ines Weizman, Dr. Norbert Korrek and Dr. Christiane Wolf. It was built on documents, photos and interviews undertaken by students under the guidance of Ines Weizman and Norbert Korrek and translated, processed and produced by the Centre for Documentary Architecture.
Staff and students from numerous parts of the University, including the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, the Faculty of Media and the Modernism Archive, were involved in developing and implementing the exhibition, which also includes numerous interviews with previous organisers and guests about their memories of the colloquiums and their importance at the time. The staff of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Bauhaus Archive Berlin also helped with the website that was developed by Ines Weizman in conjunction with the graphic designer Moritz Ebeling to advertise this year’s 14th International Bauhaus Colloquium from 10 to 12 April.
The project was funded by the Bauhaus100 Anniversary Fund, the Creative Fund, the Women’s Development Fund and the Modernism Archive at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, as well as the Centre for Documentary Architecture.
More information:
Web archive »The International Bauhaus Colloquium in Weimar 1976-2019. Helping to reappropriate Bauhaus«
»Dust & Data. Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years«. This book, published by Spector Books Leipzig in 2019, presents and takes an in-depth look at the colloquium’s range of approaches and presentation forms, as well as the exhibition on the colloquium’s forty-year history.