Bauhaus Beyond Design: 100 years of creative learning and learning creativity

Bauhaus Beyond Design: 100 years of creative learning and learning creativity

The library of the Goethe-Institut in Athens developed a variety of educational formats for the 100-year anniversary of the Bauhaus design school, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. These formats include modularized workshops for youths, a Bauhaus Thematic Space, and a series of maker space workshops on Bauhaus Meets Commons. The modularized Bauhaus DIY workshops, which are available online free of charge, seek to acquaint children and youths with the creative design education at the Bauhaus through the exploration of e.g. color, shape, and light, but also the revolutionary spirit of the art school through its utopian ideas. The Bauhaus Thematic Space includes board games, Bauhaus furniture, VR applications—such as the Virtual Bauhaus—and 100 book titles on the Bauhaus. In our event series Bauhaus Meets Commons, we asked how the socio-political ideas of the Bauhaus would speak to the commons movement today, in light of technological innovation. Through makerspace workshops with students from the arts and crafts, as well as conceptual panel discussions, we re-imagined a Bauhaus chair with sustainable materials, through commoning practices, for the purpose of providing a good of daily need for the many (not the few)—licensed under Creative Commons.