CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/16/2017

Between utopia and industrial culture: Craft Becomes Modern

This 1928-29 photograph of the metal workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau is reproduced from Craft Becomes Modern: The Bauhaus in the Making. Regina Bittner writes, “Conceived as ‘laboratories for industry,’ the workshops were places for addressing urgent questions in modern society: between individual authorship and anonymized production, between head and hand work, visual and haptic knowledge, free experimentation and economic exploitation, and amateurship and expert knowledge. From this field of tension, the Bauhaus attempted to redefine craft as a utopia, but also in convergence and/or coexistence with industrial culture.”