The Director's Room, which was opened 100 years ago on the occasion of the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923, is still considered the "big bang" of modern design and architecture and is representative of the legacy of the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Design students from the Faculty of Art and Design have now taken up this spatial and creative legacy and developed new conceptual, creative and material approaches using digital design and production processes.
The three projects shown in this exhibition stem from a collaboration between the professorships of Emerging Technologies and Design and Theory and History of Design, who in the summer semester of 2023 devoted themselves jointly, i.e. practically, theoretically, and methodologically, to topics of digital fabrication, material efficiency and waste recycling, and contextualized these within the Bauhaus design heritage. To this end, in the project module "Misfits," students made use of emergent digital technologies for capture, design, and fabrication (such as 3D scanning, parametric modeling, and CNC milling) to develop new approaches, particularly at the material level, for a progressive reconceptualization of the Director's Room.
Specifically, the focus was on the use of "low-grade" hardwood, which is mostly sorted out by the timber industry, e.g. tree forks, inosculations, crooked, small, irregular, but also infested tree parts. In the project module "Misfits", an opposite approach was taken: precisely the idiosyncrasies and specificities of the material were used as a space for design to become active. This stands in direct contrast to the furniture of the Director's Room, in which the timber is used only after being straightened and standardized. Accordingly, the project module "Misfits" bypassed this "modern" industrialized timber processing logic and instead focused on the (original) material peculiarities as new (old) design possibilities. At the same time, the students were asked to challenge traditional categories such as "exhibition," "furniture," "standard," or "product," and thus to enter into a contemporary negotiation with the Director's Room as a historical site of modernism.
Colaborator: Ezra Spitzbarth | Photos: Felix Kummich
