“Bauhaus Coupling: Critical Illustrations on Ise & Walter Gropius”

by Inés Toscano, Altyn Ozdemir and Omar Khaled Salama

Abstract

During the short duration of the Bauhaus School, which not only joined arts, crafts, and industry, over seventy couples were formed. Some relationships lasted a lifetime as Ise and Walter Gropius, and others went their separate ways like Lucia and László Moholy-Nagy. Considering that 2019 was the hundredth anniversary year of the Staatliches Bauhaus — and because the Dessau International Architecture English master program of the Hochschule Anhalt is situated right next to the building attributed to Walter Gropius —, the institution has programmed two elective courses that dived itself into the gendered landscape: Gender Masquerade and Mapping Bauhaus Couplings are proactive intersectional-feminist pedagogies that utilize the content of couplings (a term Colomina coined in 1999 for professional partnerships that are also intimate) to unmask stereotypical gender roles in the practice of architecture towards new ethical directives such as collaboration, cross-disciplinary exchange, diversity, and tolerance. As the final assignment of Gender Masquerade, Omar Khaled Salama (Egypt) has chosen to illustrate the (hi)story of Ise and Walter Gropius. It was also the Mapping Bauhaus Couplings' subject that Altyn Ozdemir (Turkmenistan) for an activist event called #unmaskingbauhaus held around the DIA campus. Through historical research and illustration methods, the students of both electives understood the gender politics of the architectural profession. Also, they engaged critically with issues of domestic and architectural labor.

Keywords: feminism, architecture, activism, Bauhaus, coupling, illustrations

1. Graphic Novel: “Mr. & Mrs. Bauhaus: The Modernist Partnership of Ise and Walter Gropius” Date of Creation: September 2020. Author: Omar Khaled Salama (Egypt), Master Architecture Student.

2.Collage: “Ise and Walter Gropius: Symbiotic Duality” Author: Altyn Ozdemir (Turkmenistan), Master Architecture Student. Date of Creation: November 2019.

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Institution: Dessau International Architecture, Hochschule Anhalt, Germany.

Lecturer: Inés Toscano (Argentina), Hochschule Anhalt and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany.