When I’m not bemoaning the woes of student life, sometimes I can produce things of substance. Here’s one of my more serious and critical pieces.

Step onto any street in present day East Berlin and witness a barrage of a spray-painted dystopia. You’ll be bombarded by blocks of graffiti, seemingly hanging from the walls of buildings like unfinished sentences, revealing in all their glory an iron will to fight against a rigid dictatorship. A form of expression and retaliation against the GDR in the Eastern Bloc, nowhere is this more true than the areas of Kreuzeberg and Mitte. But by taking a step away from these appropriated canvases of low-brow artistic expression and towards the inner west reveals a pinnacle aspect of German art – that of the Bauhaus movement. True to the synonymous relationship between Germany and the country’s attributes of efficiency and functionality, the Bauhaus movement and it’s principles of form with function and simplicity in multiplicity are on display at the Bauhaus Archiv, just south of Tiersgarten. One of the Twentieth Century’s most important schools of design (spread across three campuses in its heyday), The Bauhaus collection represents the entire spectrum of the post-expressionism discipline, a reflection of the unity between art and design as seen by founder Walter Gropius. With the permanent exhibition transporting visitors back to the post-world-war one new objective aestheticism of the Twentieth Century, viewers can see more recent and temporary exhibits, providing a testament to the longevity of minimalism in the face of lavishness and the union between form and function.

Beginning with a timeline of major milestones for the design school, the Archiv is split into four interconnected sections. Separate, freestanding parts of a congruous whole, even the architecture of the Bauhaus exhibit is true to the modernist art form’s pragmatic aesthetics. Beginning with the effects of the depression on the Bauhaus aesthetic and use of materials, to the dissolution in 1924 and its reopening in 1925, the Archiv displays the distinct Bauhaus reappropriation of materials. A pinnacle of 20^th century furniture design, the Wassily armchair, named after Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky by student Marcel Breur in 1925, it embodies a shift away from personal luxury with its light and easy assemblage. Made from bended steel tubes, symbolic of a scarcity of materials throughout the Depression era, the modern furniture featured throughout the exhibition encompasses the goals of the Bauhaus emphasis on design for the masses with its abandonment of traditional form in favour of functional design.

The Werkbund Exhibition of Paris 1930, a coffee bar with the air of a modern bar or club, similarly demonstrates the Bauhaus approach towards a new social model. Displayed as a fixture to feature inside a modern high-rise apartment, Walter Gropius’ vision of an inner city dwelling (informed by the influences and collaborative efforts of a team of previous Bauhaus colleagues such as Bayer, Breuer and Maholy-Nagy) appears as a lop-sided horseshoe, a strong contrast to traditional dining settings. A reworking of human habitats and communal space, the installation displays a reaction to industralisation, over-population and urbanisation with an innovative use of space and a geometrically defined environment.

In tune with a similar quest for functionality is the displayed work of Mies de Rohe, in particular his student’s courthouses. The Archiv features sketches of floor plans and architectural drawings, all representative of the Bauhaus school’s teachings of the a new spatial analysis of man and his domestic surroundings. Mies and his students developed a series of open plan one-storey dwellings, consisting of T-shaped houses with a long rectangular window to look out onto a garden. Creating a harmonious interrelationship not just between the enclosure of the building and its rooms, but also the surroundings of the dwelling, Mies and his students attempted to create a new experience of domestic space through a reconfiguration of the enclosure’s walls and their relation to their outside environment.

A more modern approach to temporality in design is the current exhibition of Ingo Maurer’s lights. A contemporary German designer driven by new technologies, Maurer’s work carries on the principles of Bauhaus with appropriation of a range of materials, from Japanese textiles to the use of OLEDs. Maurer’s lights don’t just provide illumination, they’re responsible for the room’s atmosphere, and are world renown; they feature at Toronto Airport and at Paris Galeries Lafeyette Maison.

Most prominent of the exhibition is Maurer’s homage to Thomas Edison in his installation Hoi Polloi. A reaction against the EU ban on standard light bulbs, Hoi Polloi features what could be called the Moses of all light bulbs. Hoi Polloi uses an innovation in illumination called WanderLux. True to Bauhaus principles, WanderLux is an appropriation of the incandescent light bulb and LED technology, heralded as the lovechild of these two illuminative options. Quite literally a beacon of endless possibilities for irradiating one’s personal space, Maurer’s whole exhibition appears to be an open declaration of admiration for Thomas Edison’s invention. Meticulously placed at the end of Maurer’s exhibition, Hoi Polloi transforms his electronic light display into a political statement, disdaining the EU’s reduction in different light qualities and making a stand for the benefits of choice when it comes to the form and function of the humble lamp-shade.