Women and Power in the History of Modern Architecture: The Case of the CIAM Congresses, 1928–1937 (2024)

In 1919, in Weimar (Germany), Walter Gropius founded the Staatliche Bauhaus: a place for building. The project was conceived as a utopian school for training the new artisans who would be needed for the start of a tumultuous century, integrating a range of artistic disciplines by means of objects and architecture. It was an idea that would evolve towards design based on its Dessau site with the celebrated slogan ‘art and technology: a new unity’. They were committed to a social and functional understanding of art by means of the profound ethical and aesthetic stance it would take against the dehumanisation inherent in interwar industrial society. The cultural, social, pedagogical and artistic impact that this singular institution achieved had an influence of immense magnitude, which culminated in its final headquarters in Berlin being shut down by the Prussian arm of the Nazi Party in 1933.The intellectual appreciation of Bauhaus is something that has historically focused on its male protagonists, overlooking a series of women artists, designers, stage designers, painters and architects who trained there and made a decisive contribution to this ‘revolution’, and whose work has had a lower profile in the public perception of the Bauhaus, even though they pursued professional careers that went on to have an undoubted international impact. In this book, Marisa Vadillo helps to fill this void, completing the picture of the school by revisiting the outstanding role played by these women, who were so fundamental to an unrepeatable chapter of 20 th -century art: Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, Margarete Leischner, Otti Berger, Margarete Reichardt, Else Mögelin, Marianne Brandt, Alma Buscher, Marguerite Wildenhain-Friedlander, Grete Heymann-Marks, Ilse Fehling, Wera Meyer-Waldeck and Annemarie Mauck. The book was originally released in Spanish in 2016, published by Cántico, and in 2018 was the recipient of an award from the Rafael Botí Provincial Fine Art Foundation, enabling it to be translated.

MOMOWO: Women Designers, Craftswomen, Architects, and Engineers between 1918 and 1945, 2017

The Bauhaus participated as an industry in the German section of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, sending objects to the Palaces of Textile Industries and Decorative and Industrial Arts, two interiors (besides another thirteen) designed by Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe. The ground-breaking design for the Textile Industries exhibition space clearly contrasted with the architecture of the given neoclassical palace.The exhibited Bauhaus objects were samples of drapery material, upholstery material, and wall-covering materials, the three types of utilitarian weavings Anni Albers elaborated at the Bauhaus weaving workshop, apart from her own artistic wall-hangings. In the fall of 1929, after her visit to Barcelona, Albers would design an experimental wall-covering material for the Bundesschule Auditorium of Hannes Meyer’s Federal School of the ADGB in Bernau. The original weaving had two different sides, one for acoustic absorption (made out of a straw-like synthetic material with chenille backing), the other for light reflection (of a silver finishing), which would grant Albers her Bauhaus degree in February 1930.The goal of this paper is to set out the role played by Reich in the interior design of the exhibition spaces in Barcelona and to trace the origin of the material innovation of Albers’s weavings.

InVisible Culture

This thesis discusses two female weavers, Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, and their critical works from 1920-1935 that shaped Bauhaus weaving and the artistic significance of the medium. Over the course of three chapters, the thesis discusses Stölzl\u27s shift from pictorial to material interests, Albers\u27 themes of mass production and industry, and the women\u27s post Bauhaus years which involved Stölzl blending work and art and Albers expanding the capabilities and fine art presence of textile

Robin Schuldenfrei, "Preliminary Objects for Modern Subjects: László Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus Theory and Lucia Moholy’s Photographic Representation" in Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard, edited by Laura Muir (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. 95-114.

Journal of Architectural Education, 2009

Surface Design Journal , 2020

To mark the 100th anniversary of the launch of the German art and design school the Bauhaus, The Art Institute of Chicago looked to its immediate community and collection. This exhibition charts both the friendships and professional connections of textile designers and artists connected invarious ways to the city: Leonore Tawney, Claire Zeisler, and Angelo Testa studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (first called the New Bauhaus) with weaver Marli Ehrman; Else Regensteiner led the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s weaving department from 1945 to 1971; Art Institute Curator Katharine Kuh exhibited textiles in thecommercial gallery she launched in 1935.