Bauhaus Lab

Working in between art, architecture and performance, the bauhauslab 09 can reach professions, create partnerships and stimulate students that otherwise might not have worked with one another. The bauhauslab 09 invites professionals from creative disciplines as diverse as product design, the fine arts and curating to work and study on actual projects of various kinds and scales.

The bauhauslab London operates as an interdisciplinary project office. The deliverable nature of the studio’s applied projects acts as a generator for the participants’ work and collaborations. It is through the intensity of the design process, which results from the work’s actual delivery, that a high standard of outcome, and with it a high level of publicity, has been guaranteed.

We, in collaboration with the Theaterhaus Jena and the school’s Emtech programme, constructed in a very short time (January to May), and with an incredibly small budget, one of the largest projects ever built by students at the AA: a fully functional 20m x 20m x 8m public lobby and performance space for the Theatre of Jena, as well as a series of events, installations, performances and projections related to the festival and the building. The structure was brought back to the UK to Hook Park in September to conclude the studio’s first year with a performance.

Interdisciplinary knowledge exchange is one of the studio’s core points of focus. To highlight this we hosted a month-long exhibition and ‘salon’ in the AA Front Members’ Room, reinstating it as the place of conversation and discussion. In a series of talks and symposia, artists, designers, film-makers, scientists and publishers, critics and writers came together to discuss their collaborations.

The exhibition itself highlighted the studio’s own collaborations, both internal and with its various project partners including the Theaterhaus Jena and Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

The remarkably intense and richly successful collaborations have yielded unexpected and exciting results. It is unlikely that any of the participants, working alone in their respective disciplines, could ever have achieved the same kind of results, and we are looking forward to the next phase of collective experimentation.