Bauhaus 50th anniversary in 1969 | Kathleen James-Chakraborty

The Bauhaus lecture series is conceived as a commentary to the Bauhaus 100th anniversary. In fourteen lectures and talks, the reception, migration and critique of the Bauhaus and its architecture are presented through a critical perspective. The second round of seven lectures starts in April 2019.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

The lecture will be followed with a Q&A session and a conversation with Maxi Schreiber

1969 witnessed the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, as well as the death of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Hannes Meyer had predeceased them already in 1954).  This coincidence will provide the point of departure for a reassessment of the relationship between the two architects framed in part in terms of their very different attitude in their final years towards the school they had both directed.  While Mies busied himself with new buildings, Gropius, whose reputation as an architect plummeted as Mies’s star ascended, increasingly focused on enhancing the legacy of the school he had founded.  In the waning years of lives during which they had often sparred, they increasingly demonstrated a profound respect for one another even as their achievements and that of the Bauhaus were called into question by protests on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin.  She has previously taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of California Berkeley, the Ruhr Universität Bochum and the Yale School of Architecture, where she was the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History.  James-Chakraborty’s books include German Architecture for a Mass Audience(Routledge 2000), Architecture since 1400(Minnesota, 2014) andModernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany(Minnesota, 2018) as well as the edited collections Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006) and India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016).