The public program for bauhaus imaginista. Moving Away: The Internationalist Architect includes a photographic workshop devoted to the study of the school’s architectural legacy in Russia.
Participants will explore the visible and invisible traces that Bauhaus architects and urban planners have left in the Russian cities of Birobidzhan, Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Moscow, Orsk, Perm, and Solikamsk. Their investigation will focus on built projects that do not always stand out as "Bauhaus" amidst other buildings, as well as projects that have remained on paper and their phantom life in urban myths and legends. Paradoxical as the link between a visual reproduction technique and the phantom theme might appear, the workshop will show that they are not only connected through a particular photographic technique, but also through a tradition in photography that is also related to Bauhaus.
The exhibition Moving Away: The Internationalist Architect looks at the work of Bauhaus architects in the USSR and the ways in which living in the Soviet Union changed their lives. It focuses on the school’s second director Hannes Meyer and the students who followed him to the Soviet Union in early 1930s to take part in major planning projects of the first five-year plan. Like many foreign architects of the time, Tibor Weiner, Philipp Tolziner, Konrad Püschel, Antonín Urban, René Mensch, Klaus Meumann, Bela Scheffler, and Lotte Stam-Beese were hired to work at planning institutes and architecture studios in the USSR. There, they developed standard and unique designs for schools, universities, kindergartens, and houses of culture, as well as plans for blocks, villages, and cities across the country.