Bauwelt Fundamente

Resilience is a system's capacity to respond to crises and disruptions and renew itself without being fundamentally altered. The book reflects on a concept of urban development oriented to resilience and describes recent international debates about resilient development. The author identifies places for learning about resilience and presents planning projects with systems of action that can serve as models for resilient city planning.

Aldo Rossi hat, wie viele aus seiner Generation, der Architekturmoderne vorgeworfen, sie negiere die Geschichte. Das alleine reichte schon, um ihn als Vertreter der Postmoderne einzustufen.

Doch welches Geschichtsverständnis haben die Kritiker der Moderne alternativ konstruiert? Die Analyse von Rossis Schriften lässt jedenfalls nicht den Schluss zu, dass es ihm um ein „postmodernes" geschichtstheoretisches Modell in der Architektur und im Städtebau ging. Vielmehr zeigt sie, dass das überzeugte Mitglied der Kommunistischen Partei Italiens sich aus ganz unterschiedlichen und teils widersprüchlichen Quellen theoretisch beeinflussen ließ. Dazu gehörte auch die Auffassung, die Moderne fortzuführen.

Zwei zentrale Aufsätze sind zum ersten Mal in deutscher Sprache beigefügt.

The complexity of the designed world demands a critical analysis of its social and economic contexts. A design criticism worthy of its name is urgently needed, because it scarcely exists.

The design theorist Michael Erlhoff is a radical critic who focuses on concealed banalities, hidden cruelties, obscured obviousness, disguised motives, and other repressed enmeshments of design. Specifically he examines the design of weapons, design under Nazism, the design of "electric chairs," the brutality of branding, the ambivalence of service design, the violence of signs, or the ornamentalization of people as masses. This book provides the kind of self-criticism that is needed if design is finally to become self-aware.

Internal criticism of the Bauhaus

For a long time, the topic of far-left currents within Bauhaus was one of controversy. Thanks to recent research on the Communist Student Fraction (Kostufra), the leftist students are finally coming into focus. Their magazine: bauhaus. sprachrohr der studierenden. organ der kostufra was a venue for unsparing critique of events, curricula, and teachers.

The journal was published between 1930 and 1932 in Dessau and Berlin in 15 hectographed issues in a loose-leaf collection and is critically discussed here for the first time by researchers from art and cultural studies, architecture, and editorial studies. It clearly demonstrates that the experimental value of Bauhaus cannot be separated from its political radicalism.

• First detailed reappraisal of communism in Bauhaus
• With contributions by Peter Bernhard, Marcel Bois, Magdalena Droste, Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler, and others