Episodes from a Cosmopolitan Project: Bauhaus Encounters and Resonances
Dr. Regina Bittner, Director, Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation Bauhaus
In October 1934 Jack Pritchard met Walter Gropius and his wife at Victoria Station in London. Jack Pritchard founder of the Isokon Ltd. welcomed the prominent couple and offered them an apartment in the Lawn Road Flats, designed by Wells Coats. This in 1934 opened service houses became a preferred destination and temporary place to stay for artists and intellectuals from Europe, a kind of ‘arrival city’. The episode serves as point of departure of the talk, sketching out moving networks between various actors, objects, ideas and places, where the Bauhaus school resonates within different cultural context. Taking Walter Benjamin`s conception of translation as conceptual frame, the lecture doesn`t present a homogenous system of the Bauhaus unchanged by its transnational journeys, rather reveals the misunderstandings, resistances and hindrances in the migration process of modern design and architecture.
Regina Bittner (PhD) studied cultural theory and art history at Leipzig University and received her doctorate from the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. As head of the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation she is responsible for the conceptualisation and teaching of the postgraduate programme for design and global modernism studies, the Bauhaus Lab and the Coopdesignreserach programme. She has curated numerous exhibitions on the architectural, urban and cultural history of modernism as well as on the Bauhaus. She has been the Deputy Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation since 2009. Along with her teaching at the Bauhaus Master Coop Design Research, the Bauhaus Lab and at the Dessau Institute of Architecture, Bittner has been invited to numerous international conferences as well as to be a member of juries and curatoriums. Since 2018 she holds a professorship for Art History at the Martin Luther University Halle. The main focal points of her work in research and teaching are architecture and design theory and history, the modern era and migration, the cultural history of modernism and heritage studies. Her most recent curatorial and publication projects include Craft becomes modern. The Bauhaus in the making (in collaboration with Renee Padt 2017), In Reserve. The Household! Historic Models and Contemporary Positions from the Bauhaus. (in collaboration with Elke Krasny) and The Bauhaus in Calcutta. An Encounter of the Cosmopolitan Avant-garde (in collaboration with Kathrin Rhomberg, 2013).