Living in the Bauhaus

Speaker: Francesco Dal Co. Lecture in Italian.

“The Bauhaus (…) will establish a working community of skilled artist-craftsmen that will work with perfect unity of intention. Students will receive instruction in the fields of craftsmanship, drawing and painting, as well as in theory and science”. This was how architect Walter Gropius explained the principles on which he was to base the revolutionary school of which he himself became the first director. MoMA is currently devoting a major exhibition to the Bauhaus, which emerged ninety years ago with the express desire of transforming everyday spaces through art. In order to do so, it employed an innovative educational model in which teachers such as Kandinsky, Mies van der Rohe, Klee and Moholy Nagy took part.

Teachers and students at the Bauhaus – around 1,400 of them – lived together in a community in which work and private life easily combined. There were memorable parties, mostly of which had a theme and almost always involved dressing-up, requiring elaborate organization and staging. “If you don’t know the Bauhaus parties, you don’t know the Bauhaus work”, declared one student.

The intense everyday life of the school was the subject of the lecture by Francesco Dal Co, professor of History of Architecture at the IUAV University in Venice. Dal Co has also been a teacher a Yale University, from 1982 to 1991, and director of the Venice Architecture biennale, from 1988 to 1991. Since 1996, he has been the editor of Casabella magazine.

With the collaboration of the Universidad de Málaga.