Introduction

Walter Gropius establishes the Bauhaus as a school for a new world, unifying art, science and technology.1 The new world had no shape yet, it needed to be designed. Design was the way to bring this new world into shape. Existing approaches of architectural education were considered incapable of developing the proper design capacity to respond to the challenge that society was facing: Beaux-arts pedagogies relied upon cultivation of aesthetic ideals, anchored in fixed canons, reproducing a world of the past; polytechnic institutes were oriented on engineer approaches, proficiently applying existing knowledge to well-known design questions, but incapable of coping with how to design for the not-yet known; apprenticeship and pupillage was too narrow and pragmatic, and establishing a status quo of craftsmanship, rooted in tradition rather than facing “otherness”. None of these approaches where providing fundamentally new vistas for a future world to inhabit.

Volume Editors
Richard Blythe & Johan De Walsche

ISBN
978-1-944214-23-4