Craft Becomes Modern

The Bauhaus in the Making

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With all the hammering, planing, sawing, and weaving, the workshops at the Bauhaus Dessau must have been quite loud and dusty. The publication “Craft Becomes Modern. The Bauhaus in the Making” looks at the Bauhaus from the perspective of handcraft. No term was more fiercely disputed there. The workshops were transit spaces: between factory and craft business, between free experiments and industrial contract work. From this field of tension, the Bauhaus tried to define handcraft anew as a utopia, but also in coexistence with industrial culture. Contemporary design theorists and practitioners position themselves regarding how current these debates once again are today and provide new insights for understanding handcraft in the 21st century.