The Digital Bauhaus

This paper describes the use of electronic space in a fourth year undergraduate architectural design studio. It attempts to address the importance of developing a design process that is redefined by the use of computing, integrating concept and perception. This goal is set in the studio exercise, an international student design competition to design an addition to the school of architecture at the original Bauhaus/Weimar. The studio involved re-evaluating the Bauhaus principles of integrating the artist and the craftsman, but in contemporary or post-industrial terms. In 1989 the Wall came down. Seamless access of western telecommunications and media became greatly responsible for the crumbling of the rigid machine-age soviet technocracy; and with it, the former east German city of Weimar, home to the first Bauhaus, was once again a living part of architectural history. When the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture announced an international student competition to design a new addition to the school of architecture at the original Bauhaus/Weimar, we immediately decided that this should be an Electronic Bauhaus.