BAUHAUS meets COMMONS was a practical and collective research workshop conducted at LUDD in April 2019.

The idea behind a hands-on workshop on Bauhaus' cultural and artistic heritage started with the observation that there are close interconnections between Bauhaus' core practical aims and some of the key issues that modern production faces today. These remarks were particularly linked to the environment shaped by the contemporary Commons Movement. At the same time it was important to highlight the key differences between the two schools of thought, something that made us wonder how the Bauhaus’s main goals could be reshaped under the prism of the Commons and in the context of technological innovation, economic inequality, competition, and social problems.

The contemporary Commons Movement or the “sharing economy”, in a similar way to the Bauhaus thinkers, creates an alternative to the established economic model and explores how we actually want to live, create, design and produce. This environment is particularly manifested, in relation to the Bauhaus, in the duality of community and collective workshops (Makerspaces/Fab Labs), and the Open Design movement. 

During the workshop we delved deeper into those key links and differences. The basic objective was to explore in practice how the new technologies, design practices and approaches based on the Commons could contribute to or transform Bauhaus' core goals and spirit of creative activity.

Subject of the workshop’s research and creative inspiration was the Marcel Breuer “Chair with Slats”. A 1922 design with prominent influences from De Stijl and Gerrit Rietveld's furnishings, with abstract geometric compositions and controversial references. The structure of the chair is clearly reflected in the design.

5 small mixed working groups of designers and craftsmen processed both conceptually and physically different and varied versions of the chair. Each group followed a distinct direction of work assumptions. Indicatively, experiments were made with different materials, the form, the structure, the function, the interaction, the connection elements, the production methods or the addition of components that follow a standardised system as extensions or adaptations of the original object.

All projects produced at the workshop are published under Attribution 4.0 International Creative Commons licences (CC BY 4.0) for further research, development and use.

You can read more about the project and find the relevant files here: https://www.goethe.de/prj/com/en/21621710.html