In last week’s Business x Design, Eamon noted that newly appointed European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, in her September 16 State of the European Union speech, called for a “new European Bauhaus” movement to complement the EU’s Green New Deal.
Fortune‘s David Meyer, in a detailed assessment of the Commission’s green agenda, reports that von der Leyen invoked the spirit of the original Bauhaus, a design collective founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919, as a part of an ambitious plan that would fuse more aggressive targets for carbon emissions with a panoply of environmental programs and pandemic-recovery initiatives.
The Commission’s “Green Deal” proposes new restrictions on cars and buildings in order to cut EU carbon emissions by 55% by 2030, an increase from the previous benchmark of 40%. In her speech, von der Leyen asserted that meeting those targets will require nothing short of a “new cultural project for Europe.”
“Every movement has its own look and feel,” she declared. “And we need to give our systemic change its own distinct aesthetic—to match style with sustainability. This is why we will set up a new European Bauhaus—a co-creation space where architects, artists, students, engineers, designers work together to make that happen.”
A week on, it remains unclear whether the phrase “co-creation space” refers to something that will have physical form—a school or campus of some sort? a digital platform? perhaps a think tank?—or was mostly meant as a rhetorical flourish. The Commission has set a target of €750 billion in green bonds to fund the pandemic recovery programs for the EU. So far there’s no word as to whether any of that money would be earmarked for the new Bauhaus idea.
Even so, von der Leyen’s Bauhaus reference won cautious praise from the editorial board of the Financial Times. “It is tempting to dismiss this as a mere rhetorical gloss on the hard work of making the economy carbon-neutral, which will require real upfront costs for businesses and households and profound behavioral change,” the FT opined. “But that is precisely why a new Bauhaus might just be an inspired idea.”
The original Bauhaus, launched in Weimer by modernist pioneer Walter Gropius, was a multidisciplinary design collective that brought together architects (such as Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), artists (including painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee), photographers (Lazslo Moholy-Nagy), typographers, textile designers, and furniture-makers in an effort to marry the techniques and materials of mass production with the aesthetics of craftsmanship and creativity.
Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau (where it occupied an iconic complex designed by Gropius himseelf) to Berlin before the group was eventually chased from Germany altogether in 1933 by Nazi officials. But its disciples helped spawn a new design ethos that came to be known as the “International Style” in which decoration was minimized for the sake of function. In Mies van der Rohe’s famed aphorism: “Less is more.”
FT editors lauded the original Bauhaus practitioners for working in “the crucible of a social and economic transformation” that accompanied the advent of industrial mass production and consumerism, and for “responding to the opportunities offered by novel construction materials such as steel and poured concrete, technologies such as electrification, telephones and motor cars, and the new requirements of life in mass-industrial social.”
FT editors suggest tackling the great perils of our current moment of transformation—containing a pandemic and forestalling the effects of climate change—will require just that sort of radical creativity. “Von der Leyen has spotted that smart design and aesthetic innovation have a role to play in making both the economic and the cultural transformations we face go more smoothly,” the paper concluded.
Last year, the Bauhaus’s 100th anniversary was celebrated with a host of exhibits, events and retrospectives around the world—and inspired a flurry of thoughtful writing about the movement. I highly recommend Dan Chiasson’s New Yorker profile of Walter Gropius, “The Man Who Built the Bauhaus,” and New York Times design writer Nikal Saval’s “How Bauhaus Redefined What Design Could Do for Society.” (The most readable contrarian take, of course, remains Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House.)
The most recent New York Times Sunday Magazine features an evocative meditation by Saval on the bleak, even existential challenges confronting designers today. His vision of modern designers’ most urgent obligation matches that of the European Commission. “[T]he fundamental paradox of contemporary design,” he laments, is that “in an attempt to make our environment more and more comfortable, we have destroyed that environment itself.”
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
-clay.chandler@fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
British carmaker Vauxhall has unveiled a 2D version of its griffin logo, becoming the latest in a queue of automakers ditching skeuomorphic logos in favour of something more “modern.” The auto industry is collectively deciding flat graphics are better suited for the digital world.
I love a good bit of visual storytelling. From the New York Times, enjoy this scroll-through graphic rendering of President Trump’s losses and earnings over the past decade—based on the Times’ review of Trump’s tax returns.
Zaha Hadid Architects has unveiled a new skyscraper to be built on what is reportedly the most expensive plot of land in the world—2 Murray Road, Hong Kong. The bulbous, glass structure is said to be inspired the bud of Hong Kong’s bauhinia flower. The Hadid studio has a number of other works in the region, including an opera house in Guangzhou and a hotel in Macau.
Stage designer Es Devlin and sound design studio Polyphoria are crowdsourcing noises to be included in a soundscape at the UK Pavilion in the Expo 2020 Dubai (which has been postponed until next year.) Polyphoria has created a seven-minute symphony to play within the pavilion. The final composition will be made up of audio snippets contributed by the public.
Data collection practices in smart cities typically—and, perhaps, unwittingly—target people of color. That data is then sold to advertisers who push products and services that hasten gentrification, and displace the people whose data was collected. Eliza McCullough, an associate at PolicyLink, a U.S. think tank that focuses on equality and race, proposes how smart cities could be more equitable.
EVENTS BY DESIGN
October
China is currently hosting the only major auto show of the year, anywhere, in Beijing. The Beijing Auto Show began on Saturday and continues until October 5.
Dubai had, perhaps, the misfortune of hosting the World Expo this year. Originally scheduled to open in October and run until April next year, the Dubai Expo 2020 has been delayed until October next year instead. World Expos come but once every five years, so perhaps waiting one more year is okay.
Italy’s materia independent design festival will return to showcasing young Italian designers October 2, taking the exhibition online via Instagram and Facebook.
November
Dubai’s inaugural architecture festival, d3 Architecture Festival, will run November 11-13 on the sidelines of Dubai Design Week. The event will focus on sustainability—an existential issue for the desert city.
Canada’s annual graphic design fest, DesignThinkers, is running online this year, November 10-21—the first time in the event’s 20-year history that it hasn’t been held in person.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
“Design can help solve real-world problems like unemployment and [is] not just about applying a cosmetic layer over something on a superficial level.”
Says Steve Vranakis, the chief creative officer of Greece—a role I just discovered existed. Vranakis joined the Greek government last October, having previously served as president of D&AD and as head of Google’s Creative Lab EMEA. A quick Google search didn’t yield any other national-level chief creative officers (the closest was Helsinki’s city-level CDO, Hanna Harris). Vranakis, of course, believes more governments should hire for the role since “drawing on a nation’s creative minds…should be on the top of world leaders’ agenda both now and as we navigate a way out of the crisis.”
This week’s edition of BxD was curated by Eamon Barrett. Email him tips and ideas at eamon.barrett@fortune.com
