Bauhaus Kolleg
The Bauhaus Dessau Urban Studies Program
Since 1999 the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has offered an international and interdisciplinary post-graduate program, conceived for designers, urban planners, architects and other theorists interested in aspects of urbanism: the Bauhaus Kolleg.
The Bauhaus Kolleg is an extra-mural program, a kind of further training program for professionals whose work involves aspects of urban research and urban design. The one-year program, which focuses each year on a different urban issue, seeks to broaden participants’ knowledge of traditional space-related disciplines by offering specific methodologies and strategies for addressing ‘the city’. Read more…
After Levittown
Bauhaus Kolleg XIII
October 2011 to June 2012
When, in the course of the global financial crisis of 2008, the American developer Levitt & Sons had to declare bankruptcy, not only its creditors had their dream of owning a retirement home in a gated community shattered, a collective dream got shattered since Levittown had made possible the ‘American way of life’: For over 60 years it had been lived out in suburbia.
In the 1950s, the developer Levitt & Sons built planned communities, so-called Levittowns in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which consisted of more than 20,000 single-family houses as well as community buildings, schools, shopping centres, sports facilities and cultural facilities. Levittown provided homes primarily to ex servicemen returning from World War II and their families, thereby benefiting greatly from federal government supports for housing. Levitt mass-produced those homes cheaply and efficiently, realizing on a grand scale what its European colleagues from the Bauhaus had anticipated back in the 1920s with the Törten Estate in Dessau. The new Bauhaus Kolleg will take Levittown, the role model of American suburbia, and the fate of its latest developments as the starting point of a comparative international study on the economic, social and cultural implications of a global suburbia. The Bauhaus Kolleg XIII will furthermore develop critical creative approaches to this form of housing which today is no longer economically and ecologically viable. Read more…
Urban Footprints: Batavilles
Bauhaus Kolleg XII
18th October 2010 to 3rd March 2011 (1st semester)
21st March 2011 to 23rd June 2011 (2nd semester)
In 2010/2011, the Bauhaus Kolleg will focus on an early instance of international modernity in urban development and architecture – the satellite towns of the transnational company Bata. Shoe manufacturer Tomáš Bata is considered to be the Central European equivalent of Henry Ford: the organisation of the factory, the corporate structure, the architecture of the town, the spatial planning and the mechanisms of social control adhere to the same principles, which informed the processes involved in the efficient production of footwear. As a “good capitalist”, Bata pursued the interaction of economic rationalisation, technological progress and a new and visionary architectonic and social order. Zlín, where the company had its headquarters, is one of the few examples of a functional city still in existence.
Building on the outcomes of an international conference held in Zlín in 2009, the Bauhaus Kolleg will take two Bata satellite towns, Batanagar in India and East Tilbury in Great Britain, as resources for research and conceptual development. Read more…
The exhibition presenting the Kolleg from 22nd June 2011:
City Inc. – Bata Cities, Corporate Towns
