Open Studio Tallinn

Spatial Strategies: Modern Pioneers Revealed
19 . 4 . – 4 . 5 . 2017

The workshop “Spatial Strategies” aims to investigate selected artistic, urban and architectural topics with a local, but superordinate European relevance like transformation of modern heritage or industrial sites out of function. It is one of 11 workshops of each two-year cycle of the European Master’s programme at TTU with Reiseuni_lab, taking place once each year during two weeks.

The tracing of the historical, partly destroyed representations and related sites of the Bauhaus period until 1933 will be connected in a “Public Space Exhibition” to bridge the modern architecture, historical designs, performances and concepts of the Bauhaus interventions to the new buildings like the Museum 2019, activities of the city and the contemporary artistic projects of the Bauhaus foundation nowadays. During two weeks, the international group of students will deepen a concept what has been developed of the international Reiseuni_Class-03, 2016: An urban network of interventions for knowledge transfer revealing the modern heritage in Dessau.

The pathway concepts – Masters and Bauhäusler, Staging, Seriel Production, Industrial Cooperation – create the basis for the network and exhibition proposal. The concept finding will take place in dialogue with material approaches of the Bauhäusler during the Dessau period of the 20th. The investigation of the modern traces leads to heterogeneous and trans medial proposals of knowledge transfer in the public realm – a network of exhibition pathways as a public space choreography. The results will be presented and finally discussed with the team of the foundation and international guests.

Guest institution:
Tallinn University of Technology & International Master’s Programme of European Architecture in cooperation with University of Arts / HZT

Professors team:
Dr. Claudia Perren (Director Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Prof. Dr. Ing. Dagmar Jäger (TTU, Programme Director of European Architecture)

Guest lecturers:
Dr. Werner Möller (Research Associate, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Lilo Viehweg (Curator of smart materials satellites, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Dr. Regina Bittner (Head of Academy and Deputy Director, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation)
Prof. Rhys Martin (Choreographer, MA Solo Dance Authorship, University of the Art, Berlin / HZT)
Prof. Dr. Katrin Paadam (Sociologist, Tallinn University of Technology
)
Prof. Pentti Kareoja (Professor of Spatial Strategies, Aalto University, Helsinki
)

Impressions

Questions for Prof. Dr. Dagmar Jäger

The Bauhaus is not a new place for you. What led to this link between the Bauhaus and the Reiseuni of Talinn University of Technology?

Prof. Dr. Dagmar Jäger: At the Bauhaus the students experience a place of modernity, which almost 100 years ago enabled a cultural transfer between individuals and disciplines in a universal life reform model. New educational concepts were tried and tested and, in experimental laboratories with the Bauhaus’s pioneers, new means of coexistence, hybrid construction technologies, comprehensive design approaches, industrial manufacturing processes as well as unconventional design strategies and working methods were put to the test and often realised for the very first time.
In the first year, the workshop series of the Reiseuni takes the group of students from Tallinn to Helsinki and via Ljubljana and Haifa to Dessau. In Haifa or, more precisely, in Hadar HaCarmel, the students had previously studied the transformation of the built context around Talpiot Market. This part of the city features many modern buildings by architects who fled National Socialism, which absorb the democratic spirit of an open, urban society on the upswing. To rethink this urban context together with Israeli students and tutors and, in Dessau, to travel “forwards in time” to the modern era in order to spatialise and materialise history in the urban fabric – this experience fosters an awareness of the historic depth and mobility of substances – of ideas, people, concepts and cultures.
From Dessau, the work trip continues to Innsbruck and Lisbon. The exchange among the young people in the group, with local residents, tutors and students, in the joint work in the studio and, of course, the experience of staying for several weeks in each of the countries, offer a wealth of opportunities to learn new things and to reconsider firmly held positions.