Open call: School FUNDAMENTAL

What would a Bauhaus School look like today? How would such a school approach designing our lived environment in a global society? What kinds of experiments would it pursue? How would it organise communal living and learning? And how could the campus microcosm serve to plant the seed for a politics of socially conscious design?

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is commemorating the Centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus with a series of festivals that engage with the school’s heritage. The opening festival School FUNDAMENTAL revisits the original pedagogical practice of the Bauhaus with an eye to its contemporary potential. School FUNDAMENTAL seeks to offer a platform and testing ground for alternative schooling models and learning experiments from the past and the present.

Join us in Dessau for the Parliament of Schools! 

In the “Parliament of Schools,” one of the main lines of the festival’s programming, new and alternative models of design pedagogy will meet in a temporary school, forming a testing ground for transcultural pedagogical experiments. Join us in Dessau for this Parliament of Schools! We invite international experimental schools, initiatives, spaces of learning and temporary campuses currently developing design pedagogies beyond the dominant educational and epistemological canons, thus exploring alternatives to existing hierarchies and inequalities of access to knowledge and education. During the five days of the festival we want to discuss the politics and institutions, forms and spaces of socially responsible design for the everyday and allow these ideas to materialize on site.

Though the Bauhaus was active as a school for a mere six years, its links, both visible and invisible, to modern arts education endure into the present and they have established a global paradigm for the training of designers and artists. The Bauhaus curriculum was embedded into the architecture of the Bauhaus Building from the very beginning and is still apparent in the building’s walls and spaces to this day. The Bauhaus School embodies the conviction that schools are a testing ground for configuring ways of living together in the future; rather than “institutions of higher learning,” they offer creatives a place to experiment and play.

The historical learning environment of the Bauhaus Building provides the starting and reference point for the varied programme and format of the festival School FUNDAMENTAL. From March 20-24, 2019 the building will be turned into a resonance chamber for international explorations in design education during the “third industrial revolution.”

To apply please include a project outline, a brief description of your “school” and its founders (max. 2000 characters). A clear relationship to the historical Bauhaus and/or the Bauhaus Building should be evident from the project outline. The deadline for submissions is 15 August 2018. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will cover travel, accommodation, and production costs for the selected applicants.

To learn more about the festival or the selection process you may contact Philipp Sack (sack [​at​] bauhaus-dessau.de).

More information on the festivals, and the Centenary at Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in general, can be found on our website