The time is ripe for a social change that starts from culture, a real Green revolution that will see a greater involvement of professionals, experiences and skills to implement a new creative and interdisciplinary initiative called “New European Bauhaus“, meeting space to design future ways of living, located at the crossroads between art, culture, social inclusion, science and technology. But it's just the beginning of a new way to participate in the change by bringing the Green Deal in our places of life but which will require a collective effort - even political - to imagine and build a future that is sustainable, inclusive and beautiful for our minds and for our souls.
The Commission has started the planning phase of the New European Bauhaus initiative, announced by the President Ursula von der Leyen in his 2020 State of the Union address. The New European Bauhaus is an environmental, economic and cultural project, which aims to combine design, sustainability, accessibility, convenience and investment in order to contribute to the realization of the European Green Deal. The core values of the New European Bauhaus are therefore sustainability, aesthetics and inclusiveness. The goal of the design phase is to use a co-creation process to shape the concept by exploring ideas, identifying the most pressing needs and challenges, and to connect stakeholders. As part of the planning phase, the Commission will launch the inaugural New European Bauhaus Prize this spring. This planning phase will lead to the opening of calls for proposals in the autumn of this year to bring the new ideas of the European Bauhaus to life in at least five locations in EU Member States, through the use of EU funds at national and regional level. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “The New European Bauhaus is a hopeful project to explore how we live better together after the pandemic. It's about combining sustainability and style, to bring the European Green Deal closer to the minds of people and homes. We need all creative minds – designers, artists, scientists, architects and citizens – to make the new European Bauhaus a success.”
The New European Bauhaus is a creative and interdisciplinary initiative, convening a meeting space to design future ways of living, located at the crossroads between art, culture, social inclusion, science and technology. It means create inclusive and accessible spaces where the dialogue between different cultures, disciplines, genders and ages becomes an opportunity to imagine a better place for everyone. It means also a more inclusive economy, where wealth is distributed and spaces are accessible, and sustainable solutions that create a dialogue between our built environment and the planet's ecosystems. It means implement regenerative approaches inspired by natural cycles that replenish resources and protect biodiversity. It means enriching experiences that respond to needs beyond our material dimension, inspired by creativity, art and culture. It means appreciate diversity as an opportunity to learn from each other.
Il New European Bauhaus is a creative initiative that breaks down the boundaries between science and technology, art, culture and social inclusion, to allow design to find solutions to everyday problems. On the dedicated website launched today, artists, designers, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, architects, students and all interested people can share examples of inspiring achievements for the New European Bauhaus, their ideas on how it should be shaped and how it should evolve, as well as their concerns and challenges. This is the beginning of an innovative process. Organizations wishing to engage more in this process can become "partners of the new European Bauhaus", by responding to the call on the website. In the coming months, the Commission will award prizes to existing examples that embody the initiative's key values and that can inspire debate and transform the places where we live. In the next phase of the initiative, the “handover” phase, five pilot projects will be launched to co-design new sustainable and inclusive solutions with style. The objective of the third phase, “dissemination”, is to disseminate the ideas and concepts that define the New European Bauhaus through new projects, networking and knowledge sharing, in Europe and beyond.
"I want NextGenerationEU unleash a wave of European renewal and make our Union a leader in the circular economy. But this is not just an environmental or economic project: it must be a new cultural project for Europe." Ursula Von der Leyen
While Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said"With the new European Bauhaus our ambition is to develop an innovative framework to support, facilitate and accelerate the green transformation by combining sustainability and aesthetics. By being a bridge between the world of art and culture on the one hand and the world of science and technology on the other, we will make sure to involve society as a whole: our artists, our students, our architects, our engineers, our academia, our innovators. A systemic change will begin."
Italy also participates, today we find the Triennale di Milano with a series of conferences.
A bit of Bauhaus history (link to full article): “Bauhaus, the architecture that revolutionized itself” Walter Gropius was the most admired character, who had founded in 1919 the Bauhaus, school of decorative art and architecture. A true center of art, a true intellectual commune, almost a spiritual movement. At that time Gropius was 36 years old, a slender physique, courteous and always dressed in the typically German style of the time. The painter Paul Klee he called it,"Silver Prince" Josef Albers, a painter, held a course at the Bauhaus and brought a bundle of newspapers to the classroom every day inviting the students to create works of art. And that's how in the next lesson he found the classroom full of airplanes, boats, castles of cards and fantastic objects, all made with written pages that almost narrated their story. But what excited him the most was that work created only with a folding of the newspaper, a curtain: the only true work of art in paper. While everything else could also be turned into stone or metal. The Bauhaus style was born from some assumptions, the first that architecture was created for the workers, that is to give them houses suited to their needs; according to which this architecture repudiated everything that belonged to the bourgeoisie. And it didn't take long to see buildings built with honest materials such as concrete, wood, steel or glass. A true race towards functionalism which, however, did not always mean functionality. For example, the roofs were no longer to be sloping. With noble cornices representing bourgeois residences, but they had to be flat and without cornices or sumptuous gutters. Far from functional in cities like Berlin or Rotterdam, where it snowed a lot, the snow got stuck on the roof. Even the false facades and the use of precious materials had to disappear in this new architecture, while the internal structure had to be expressed on the outside of the building and without ornaments; visible from the walls of steel and glass. In 1937 the Silver Prince went to the United States having fled with the advent of Nazism, and with him Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was director of the Bauhaus as early as 1930. Gropius was appointed dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Harvard University. While Mies became director of the Faculty of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In reality all the projects that were elaborated by the teaching of this artistic movement were identical. Everyone designed a box of glass, steel and concrete, which was called "Yale box”; in reference to the course of the Yale University of New Haven in Connecticut.
The same Frank Lloyd Wright he was baffled by the unedifying results, to the point that Miles himself called Wright a genius who deserved credit for having opened his eyes to European architects. The same Louis Khan was commissioned to design an extension of the Yale University art gallery, the result was a project for a glass box, where the only details highlighted on a flat surface were five rows of brown-colored vitrified bricks. It could have looked like a garage, in fact the university administrators were baffled, but they gave in. From 1928 to 1935 Wright built two buildings and in 1936 he built the House on the Waterfall, a concrete slab residence anchored in rock and suspended over a waterfall in the Pennsylvania highlands. We also owe him the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Here an architecture that forbids all exuberance and grandeur becomes the new building of the workers…but born from the rubble of Europe; it thus became a style taken as a model for museums, apartments for the rich, and headquarters of large companies: less so than for the homes of workers. But why live in buildings that look more like factories than residences? Fashion, simply be fashionable! Like all art…which becomes important precisely when it becomes fashionable. In St. Louis, Missouri, a housing development for workers opened in 1955. But they had long since moved to the suburbs, so the complex was occupied by immigrants who had just arrived from the countryside. And in each floor of this complex there were covered passages corresponding to the principles of the French Le Corbusier, but lacked more private places, because everything took place in airy "airways". So people left and millions of dollars were spent trying to make the Pruitt-Igor, this is his name. In 1972 the municipality had the three central buildings demolished with dynamite. However, the Bauhaus marked a model of modernity that has also influenced creativity in the aftermath of the search for openness to the world, without stages built on luxury and, because… after all, life is truly a glass box.
