Design seminars at the Bauhaus Dessau

Fifty years after the original construction of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, it was reopened in 1976 as the Bauhaus Dessau Scientific and Cultural Centre. On 2 April 1984, the Bauhaus Dessau Experimental and Education Centre began its work as a branch of the Office for Industrial Design (AiF) under the direction of Karl-Heinz Burmeister with workshops, seminars and other further education formats.
Its often internationally oriented design seminars emphasized the idea of crossing borders, particularly between ‘space and object, in their mutual relationships in the city, the home, the workplace, and wherever else’, as described by design theorist Heinz Hirdina (1942–2013) in his comprehensive survey ‘Gestalten für die Serie: Design in der DDR 1949–1985’. Examples included the Hannes Meyer seminar on urban planning, the summer seminars for ‘Formgestalter’ (East Germany’s term for designers), the Bruno Taut seminar on housing construction, and the 1986 Ferdinand Kramer design seminar on storage in the home.