The O Horizon
A Film Produced for bauhaus imaginista

Gunta Stölzl. Anni Albers. Das sind die heute prominentesten Namen, wenn man an Akteur*innen der Textilwerkstatt am Bauhaus denkt. Beide waren seit Weimarer Zeiten engagiert in der Textilwerkstatt, prägten sie durch ihre Auffassung vom Textilen, lehrten dort. Otti Berger stieß erst zu Dessauer Zeiten zur Werkstatt. Stölzl und Albers gelang 1931–1932 der Weggang aus Deutschland. Und es gelang ihnen, als Textilgestalterinnen und Künstlerinnen dauerhaft weiterzuarbeiten, eine spezifische Arbeitspraxis zu entwickeln und ein umfangreiches Werk aufzubauen. Bedingt gelang dies zunächst auch Berger, wenn auch unter erschwerten Bedingungen.

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.

One day in September 1936, Ernestine Fantl, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Lázló Moholy-Nagy stood looking at the new Penguin Pond in London Zoo. Fantl was on a research trip for an upcoming exhibition, Modern Architecture in England, that would heavily feature the striking structures Soviet émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had built at the London and Whipsnade Zoos, among them the Penguin Pond. Realizing “that no still photograph could do justice to the pool or its denizens,” on the spot Fantl commissioned Moholy to produce a film about Tecton’s animal enclosures.