Das Bauhaus verfehlen / Missing the Bauhaus

It is 2022, just over a century since the founding of arguably the world’s most widely celebrated art and design school. In 2019, on the occasion of the Bauhaus’ centenary, the world’s media focused on the various ‘legacies’ of this school. Such retrospective appraisals of Bauhaus moment(s), movement(s) and model(s) demonstrate that the school has certainly not gone missing. Using the notion of verfehlen/missing as a point of departure, these time-travelling and varied contributions from the Global South posit different ways in which the word missing may be applied to the Bauhaus: Contributors from arts, architecture and design backgrounds raise and critique a range of problematic aspects attached to a nostalgic position of longing for the Bauhaus and reveal numerous instances of how the school’s mythologised model, freighted with Western confidence and hardheadedness, often simply misses, and continues to miss the point.