Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design

428 EAAE no 35 Teaching and Experimenting with Architectural Design: Advances in Technology and Changes in Pedagogy

read the meaning of architectural symbols, but also learn to make their architecture

speak with meaningful combinations.

Once I had arrived in Weimar, I visited the Bauhaus University, which is now back

in its original premises [fig. 4]. I was struck by the same sense of astonishment that I

had experienced in the basement of the Technical University Eindhoven. The Bauhaus

tradition of Morphology is completely invisible in the teaching of architecture and

art here. The assignments that count as Morphology are in fact mini design projects,

just as they are at in the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam. Professor Burkhart

Grashorn was surprised by my quasi-archaeological interest in the courses taught by

his predecessors and it was only after I had pressed him further that he went on to

describe the relation between the Bauhaus of today and the Bauhaus of then as ‘warm

but distant’. All the same, some traces could be found. For instance, various design

projects made connections with works by Oskar Schlemmer, for instance, for whose

dancing figures digital spaces had been designed that were visualised as a video

clip with dancers. The role of the earlier Bauhaus professors in this course can best

be compared with that of Rem Koolhaas as a phantom professor in practically every

architecture course in the Netherlands, and the tradition of the Bauhaus University

is invisibly productive.

It is another graduate from the Bauhaus, Peter Jenny, who is one of the few to have

successfully continued a tradition of Morphology that is still very much alive. He

propagates a kind of visual thinking (bildnerischen Denkens) at the ETH in Zurich, and

sees it as a necessary supplement to the abstract way of thinking that is commonly

found in the academic world. His teaching includes practical activity — making — as

fig 4