Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years

by Nicholas de Monchaux, Peter Bernhard (Artist), Christopher Green (Contributor)

The edited volume addresses the hundred-year history of the Bauhaus by framing it using two material concepts: dust and data. While “dust” foregrounds new approaches to the material analysis of objects and ruins, “data” designates new approaches to managing the enormous amount of information accumulated about the subject over the past century. The book gathers a group of leading international scholars, architects, theorists, artists, and novelists to unearth new details about the history of the school and to reveal the perspectives of marginalized, dislocated, silenced, and dispersed voices that have previously gone unheard. These include the voices of queer architects, of the (too) few women practitioners, and of those in the global South who studied at the Bauhaus or were influenced by its ideas. The book also examines how the school was perceived beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War.
The essays, conversations, and documents collected in the volume cover the time span that starts with the inception of the Bauhaus school in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of World War I and extends through several stages of dislocation to its demise on the eve of World War II. But the anthology also engages with the school’s multiple afterlives; it deals with the migration of teachers and students, the dissemination of its ideas into various cultural contexts, the state of the buildings that were left behind, and the circulation of objects produced by Bauhaus protagonists.

630 pages, Paperback

Published February 18, 2020

Reviews

[Andrei Stoica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven’t finished every essay, but some of the archive insights have been really interesting. Reminds me of one of my favorite classes in university - taught by essentially a Bauhaus historian - in the best way :)