Annual Theme 2020
Habitat

When a young generation of architects demanded the Charter of Habitat at the 9th CIAM Congress in Aix en Provence in 1953, a paradigm shift was initiated in the discourse on modernism in architecture and urban planning: The cultural practice of living and the investigation of living conditions took the place of functionalist planning for the subsistence minimum and the understanding of the home as a living machine. In architecture, questions about living spaces as social spaces and the relationship between human beings and the environment came to the fore. In addition, the focus was extended to the practice of living in non-European cultures and community structures. The architects and designers thus took up ideas from the 1920s from the context of the world economic crisis: Cooperative housing projects, the settlement movement or self-sufficient houses are among them.

Today, the global housing issue is once again challenging usThe environment is no longer understood as a mute resource to be built on. House and world, man and nature are no longer opposites, but intertwined and interdependent. Using historical models and current positions, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is dedicated to the complex spheres of  Habitat  in its projects, exhibitions, debates and publications in 2020.