We are interested in the Bauhaus from a contemporary perspective— not the fetishization and mythologization of a legacy. In our view, many of the objectives of classical modernism show promise for the present day—be it design’s alignment to utility and function, the belief in the emancipatory potential of design, the integration of design with diverse forms of modernday under standing and technologies, or the critique of the present through design. Our focus lies less on actual Bauhaus products than on the school’s ambitions and methods. In the interests of a reflective modernism, it behooves us to examine and critically reflect on the history of the development and impact of the historic Bauhaus, so that we can learn from its mistakes and impasses. This international edition on the work of project bauhaus now offers English readers a comprehensive overview of our multi-year research, performance, and publication project, which involved the participation of more than a hundred renowned scientists, artists, architects, and designers from around the world. When we started the project five years ago, we wrote: The expansion of design into all realms of life and the world, from landscapes, roads, and cities to workplaces, the home and, deeper still, into people and their relationships, nanostructures, and the genome, is contemporary reality. In the context of these aetheticizations and subjectivizations of dominance, given the universal profusion of design its absence would perhaps be a 
liberating moment. Could the absence of design really be liberating? As long as design is only understood as aestheticization, this thesis certainly has its justification. But what if design encompasses more? What if it is only with the help of design that we can formulate a critique of the present, whose complexity we can no longer understand without technology? Our initial question, “Can design change society?” has accompanied the project over the years. With this question, we implicitly put not only the Bauhaus’s ambition to influence society through design up for discussion, but also the image of the architect or designer associated with it, who can swoop in and steer social processes in the right direction with a few formal inventions. So what is the role of design in society? One thing is certain: by designing, we can make a statement about how the world is or should be. Design is therefore increasingly used as an instrument of critique, which helps us to describe and penetrate the complexity of the world. It occupies a neuralgic point at which political and social questions meet, a point at which issues related to energy efficiency, climate, and the use of resources—in short, issues concerning our survival as a species—are dealt with. However, we cannot expect the creative disciplines to take on this superhuman task single-handedly. Designers are not godlike artist-engineers who can transform society and save the world. Yet this air of self-importance and arrogance is another legacy of modernism and the Bauhaus, which we sought to address with project bauhaus. It is in this sense that our proposed Bauhaus “funeral” should also be understood, not as pure provocation or unproductive Bauhaus-bashing on its centennial. By symbolically burying the Bauhaus, we want to leave behind the self-referential loops in order to release energies for other alliances. For it is only in and with society, and together with other social actors—which is also a lesson of the historical Bauhaus—will we be able to change society.weiterlesen