Charrette A Part Of, and Apart From… Carolyn Butterworth & Leo Care The University of Sheffield ABSTRACT A reflection upon a workshop delivered in March 2019 by the authors and students at the ‘School Fundamental’ Festival, Bauhaus, Dessau. The event marked a hundred years of the Bauhaus and twenty years of SSoA Live Projects, providing an excellent opportunity to reflect upon our live pedagogical experience within the context of the Bauhaus legacy. The workshop addressed the polarisation that can occur when discussing different types of student projects, using a matrix of four, commonly used terms: Real, Deliverable, Speculative, Abstract. Outcomes revealed how a student project can have value as both a part of, and apart from the external world. KEYWORDS live projects, speculation, Bauhaus, collaboration, reflective pedagogy 53 | Charrette 6(2) Autumn 2020 Introduction 2019 marked the centenary of the Bauhaus, an anniversary that prompted reflection upon a pedagogical legacy that is still the basis for much of contemporary design education. In March 2019 Bauhaus 100 held its ‘School Fundamental’ Festival, bringing together educators from around the world to share and reflect on contemporary approaches to teaching design, in the rich historic context of the Bauhaus Dessau building. Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA) was invited to contribute a workshop to the Festival showcasing our live pedagogy. SSoA Live Projects involve groups of architecture students working with external community clients from the public or voluntary sector on six-week co-design projects. Some projects involve construction, others are more strategic – proposing visions at building, street, neighbourhood, city or regional scale. All projects support their clients to promote wider participation in the production of an inclusive and democratic built environment. Coincidentally, 2019 was an anniversary year for SSoA Live Projects - over the last twenty years, 2200 students have worked with community partners on 220 Live Projects in 16 countries. This workshop offered us and our students an excellent opportunity to reflect upon this accumulated live pedagogical experience and explore future possible trajectories of learning. As Live Projects have become more common in schools of architecture, we have seen a tendency to separate out approaches to architectural education in contemporary discourse. When discussing live pedagogy in comparison to other approaches to learning such as self-initiated studio-based projects, polarisations quickly emerge such as abstract/real, studio/city, vocational/ academic, speculative/deliverable. We believe that this creeping polarisation of binaries is resulting in a limiting of architectural education where the rich complexity of ‘both... and’ is being replaced with the reductive nature of ‘either... or’. With this in mind we became intrigued by Bauhaus Director Walter Gropius’ tenet ‘unity in the combination not the division’ of different approaches to design,1 an ethos that he managed to pursue to the clear benefit of Bauhaus students, despite the often polarised views of their teachers. This paper describes how Gropius’ insistence upon plurality in design education, and the Bauhaus Dessau building itself, provided us with a stimulating pedagogical and physical environment for our workshop. Gropius valued abstract explorations in the studio and design collaborations with industry equally, believing a good designer needed both. Within the terms of our workshop, Gropius valued being apart from the contingencies of everyday life while, at the same time, being a part of the world outside the studio. Presenting both an account of and collective reflections on the workshop, this paper reveals the particular capacity that student projects have to circumvent binaries, and the benefits that being both a part of, and apart from can bring to architectural education. Charrette 6(2) Autumn 2020 | 54 project Closing gaps, making connections The Bauhaus workshop provided us with an opportunity to collaborate with our students and build on a body of existing experience in reflective pedagogy and live learning at SSoA.2 The educational value of reflection3 has long been recognised within the teaching methods and assessment processes of SSoA Live Projects.4 Emphasis in marking is placed upon student critical reflection on project processes and outcomes, e.g. group working, relationship with the client, developing and meeting the brief, and the value of the project to their client and stakeholders. The students who collaborated with us in the workshop were on levels 1 and 2 of the MArch course. They had all, by this stage of the course, completed a Live Project - those in their final year had completed two. For the previous four months they had been in our MArch design studios; Studio Learning Cultures and Studio in Residence - developing self-initiated joint or individual design projects within the framework of the studios’ themes. The workshop provided an opportunity for students to take part in a non- assessed activity where their reflections could be open and expansive, exploring the wider values of their endeavours. We were keen to facilitate a workshop where they could reflect collectively and equally upon both their studio projects and live projects. Whereas reflective learning plays an explicit role in the assessment of live projects, in studio projects this is less explicit, and we were keen to encourage students to consider the two types of projects together, potentially revealing hidden connections between the two and moving beyond the polarisation that can often creep into discussion of the two project types. We chose four terms to encourage reflection on the various projects: Real, Deliverable, Speculative, Abstract. Identifying these terms as commonly used in the studio, reviews and reflective sessions, by staff and students alike, we introduced them to the workshop, fully recognising their ambiguity and slipperiness, yet hoping that they would prompt close and useful inspection of the student projects under consideration. Through the course of the workshop these terms proved useful mechanisms to elicit discussion of various aspects and values, not only of contemporary student projects, but also of contemporary and historical, built and unbuilt examples from practice. They also enabled us to draw connections with the work of the Bauhaus, revealing common pedagogical principles despite clear aesthetic differences between project outputs. Unity in combination In addition to building upon our own institution’s practice of reflective pedagogy the aim of the workshop, to close the gap between different forms 55 | Charrette 6(2) Autumn 2020 Figure 1: A view into the mural painting, metal and weaving workshops in Dessau (unknown author 1926). Image courtesy of Bauhaus- Archiv Berlin. of student project, became a lens through which to explore the pedagogical stance of the Bauhaus. It quickly became clear to us that the Bauhaus introduced students to very different approaches to learning. Indeed, the Bauhaus approach was characterised, for most of its short life, by a plurality of teaching methods, rather than a single approach. This plurality is highlighted by the difference between the Preliminary Course (Vorkurs), taken by all students in their first year, and the disciplinary Workshop courses that followed. The Vorkurs was characterised by its abstraction, ‘What made the Bauhaus preliminary course...unique was the amount and quality of its theoretical teaching, the intellectual rigour with which it examined the essentials of visual experience and artistic creativity’.5 For the purposes of our workshop we described this method of teaching as apart from the contingencies of everyday life. In contrast, the Workshop courses (in product design, painting, sculpture, weaving, printing, theatre design and, later, in architecture) placed a greater emphasis upon the applied nature of design across the various fields, with close relationships developing between industry and the Bauhaus community (Fig.1). In our workshop we defined this application and engagement outside the academy as being a part of the external world. Founding Director, Walter Gropius believed that the Bauhaus should be able to hold both approaches simultaneously: ‘I look for unity in the combination not the division of these forms of life’, he wrote: How is it that we can approve as much of the form of a well-built aeroplane, Charrette 6(2) Autumn 2020 | 56 project Figure 2: Expansion of the Dessau-Törten Settlement, Laubenganghaus, designed by HannesMeyer and the Bauhaus Dessau Architecture Department, 1929–30 (Hannes Meyer, © Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau). Image courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. automobile, machine, as of that of a single work of art made by the creative hand? We are not the kind of people to reject one or the other.6 Despite tensions amongst the teaching staff, Gropius managed to pursue this integrated teaching approach while Director between 1919 and 1928, in fact as MacCarthy states, ‘Creative dissidence was a part of the whole ethos of the Bauhaus’.7 Gropius clearly advocated both being apart from and a part of the world as the optimum learning environment for designers. Hannes Meyer’s teaching approach, however, was in stark contrast to this integrated approach, first in leading the architecture course and then as Bauhaus Director after Gropius in 1928. Meyer believed that the entirety of a designer’s education should be a part of the realities