The Bauhaus and Morocco

Ein im April 1919 veröffentlichter Traktat für seine neue Schule, verfasst von Walter Gropius, drückt die Grundprinzipien dieser neuen Schule und ihr einzigartiges Ziel aus, Architekten, Handwerker und Künstler zusammenzubringen, um eine neue Arbeits- und Ausbildungsgemeinschaft zu schaffen, die durch den Primat der Architektur und die Rückkehr zu handwerklichen Vorstellungen als Leitmotiv vereint ist. Gropius betonte die Kraft dieses Aufrufs, indem er die Broschüre als "Manifest" bezeichnete, eine Entscheidung, die an avantgardistische Kunstgruppen wie die Dadaisten und Futuristen erinnert; das Bauhaus-Manifest zum ersten (aber nicht letzten) architektonischen Manifest machte.

This article is an example of “writing by being,” because the author had the privilege of being part of the pilot “batch” of Indian design teachers. These students, many from an engineering background, were to be India’s future design educators, and their first exposure to design education took place at the newly-founded National Institute of Design, India’s first design institute, established in 1961 and inspired to a large measure by Bauhaus ideology.

In March 1950, Pietro Maria Bardi, director of the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP, which opened in 1947), wrote to several American educational institutions requesting their curricula as an aid to developing the first design course in Brazil—the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), which was to be run as a part of the museum and would also be the country’s first design school. Despite being brief and objective, his missives did not fail to mention the “spirit of the Bauhaus,” explicitly linking the institute he hoped to found with a pedagogical lineage whose objectives and approach he aimed to share.