bauhaus 12. Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s Magazine
Habitat
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau/Claudia Perren/Regina Bittner

Dwelling is more than just having a functional roof over your head. At the CIAM Congress in 1953, a group of young architects produced a Charter of Habitat calling for a radical shift away from the dogma of functionalism and universalism: informal building, dwelling as a social practice, architecture as a mode of design that generates community. The term “habitat” constitutes a pooling of the post-war modernist debates on recalibrating architecture and urban planning. It embodies a holistic view of housing, human beings, and the environment. With this in mind, Bauhaus #12 focuses on “Habitat” from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, because housing and the climate crisis are the very issues that challenge our global community today. The magazine goes in search of alternatives to the functionalist housing machine that was evident in the 1920s at the Bauhaus and elsewhere and which continued as part of the post-war modernist movement and is still prevalent today.