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Architectural education as an abbreviated sphere of national collaboration: re-examining the Bauhaus

This paper builds on the conclusions of previous research; that collaboration (synthetic labour) and creativity (synthetic work) do not amount to the same thing. Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, which spoke of the capacity of collaborative institutions to substitute for weakened or withering nations provides a starting point for a re-evaluation of the Bauhaus (1919–1933), a German institute of architectural education, which is reinterpreted as an example of abbreviated national collaboration. The paper posits the view that the contribution of architectural theory to discussions of nationalism, based on its capacity to elucidate latent aspects of the lifeworld, lies in the account it gives of the spatial and material conditions of the nation state.

Institutions of design education are reexamined as intermediate-scale operations of nationalism (literally smaller than the nation state but larger and more tangible than individual manifestoes or disembodied language). Such institutions often lay claim to a capacity for redeeming collective creativity within an experimental setting dedicated to collaborative praxis. Rather than focusing on matters of archetypal folk substance or political ideology, the paper focuses on the connective elements of institutional space, which exemplify a type of intellectual integration necessary for the construction of national identity. Deutsch’s functional concept of nationalist ‘‘equipment’’ referred to this intermediate sphere as ‘‘learned memories, symbols, habits, operating preferences, and facilities’’.

The paper is unique in its detailed analysis of the experimental re-ordering of industry within the curriculum of modernist architectural education, which was intended as a compressed version of national, collaborative labour. The paper argues that the capacity of architecture to embody national intentions exceeds static symbolic translations of ideology. Its specific power lies in its re-structuring of making as integrated collaboration.