The Bauhaus movement, which aimed to develop fresh approaches for a new period, has always been associated with contemporary German architecture, design, and artwork. The European Commission launched the New European Bauhaus movement this time. It is based on sustainability to help create future lifestyles that address people’s current concerns. It proposes that architecture, artwork, and culture collaborate with contemporary science and technology to create new and refreshing viewpoints defining the tangible acts that will enhance daily living. Europe’s New Bauhaus movement is a new environmental, economic, and cultural project for the nations of the European Union that draws its inspiration from Gropius’s Bauhaus.

Let’s look into the history of Bauhaus and how Europe’s new Bauhaus Movement came into being.

Origin of Bauhaus

The original Bauhaus was a German movement from the 1920s that combined arts and crafts with design and significantly impacted the architecture of European towns.

The Staatliches Bauhaus, often referred to as the Bauhaus was a German art school that integrated craft and fine arts from 1919 to 1933. The school gained notoriety for its design philosophy, which aimed to combine a unique aesthetic vision with the ideas of mass manufacturing and a focus on practicality.

Source: Bauhaus Exhibition Poster (1923)

The New European Bauhaus

The New European Bauhaus (NEB) plan was first announced during the State of the Union speech by Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, two years prior, in September 2020. Europe’s New Bauhaus Movement is an innovative and multidisciplinary initiative that links the European Green Deal to our living spaces and experiences.

Europe’s New Bauhaus Movement encourages envisioning and building a future that is inclusive, sustainable, and attractive to the mind and spirit.

It connects residents, professionals, companies, and organizations to reinvent sustainable living in Europe and elsewhere. The program fosters good change by giving access to EU financing for gorgeous, sustainable, and accessible initiatives and establishing a platform for experimenting and engagement.

It’s a cross-disciplinary effort that prioritizes improving the quality of life for Europeans without sacrificing environmental and technological advancements. To enable innovative and sustainable lifestyles, this initiative aims to inspire behavior, alter the current social way of thinking, engage markets, and impact public purchasing.

Even while it began with a primary focus on construction, the organization’s ultimate objective is to transcend beyond building to benefit society as a whole while exploring Europe’s cultural past and influencing its future. An inclusive, inventive future that will be co-created and realized.

The Core of The New Bauhaus

Sustainability, inclusivity, and beauty are the three core principles of Europe’s New Bauhaus Movement.

This year’s second New European Bauhaus Award, given in four distinct categories, is open to projects that meet the criteria. In 2022, the following 4 categories had winners:

• Reconnecting with Nature
• Regaining a sense of belonging
• Prioritizing the places and people that need it the most
• Shaping a circular industrial ecosystem and supporting life-cycle thinking

As most people are aware, the current green art trend transcends futuristic-looking structures.

3 Phases of NEB

Europe’s New Bauhaus Movement is divided into three phases: design, delivery, and dissemination.

During the first collective design phase from October 2020 to June 2021, the EC summarized the core aspects that emerged from the listening stage and translated them into propositions for action with a policy paper.

The implementation stage entails the creation and execution of new pilot projects, which started in September. The delivery phase’s primary goal will be the presentation of sound concepts and methods throughout Europe and the rest of the globe. To discover open and repeatable approaches, solutions, and prototypes and make them accessible to cities, communities, architects, and planners, the goal is to establish networks and share information. It will also be necessary to open a discussion with residents, companies, and academic institutions and to develop urban institutional capacity.

The dissemination phase, with its growth of the ideas and acts that have evolved and its outreach to a broader public in Europe and throughout the world, is the third and last phase, and it will begin in January 2023.

Private Sector Involvement

The specialists at the high-level forum also urge for more tangible actions, such as measuring the carbon enclosed within buildings, coupled with methods to minimize them, including using wood in place of cement.

This also translates to new prospective business for organizations in the construction industry. However, we haven’t yet noticed any real effects.

Europe’s New Bauhaus Movement is obscure to foreigners. Despite the early media attention, the movement has received minimal news in recent years, which the European Union has noticed.

Nevertheless, the project has more than 500 collaborators and many non-profit organizations. There are also “Friends of the Bauhaus” in corporate or government circles.

Friends of the Bauhaus

The New European Bauhaus could only engage some EU nations and related stakeholders within them in its first year, according to a report issued in July 2022 by the industry committee of the European Parliament.

The representatives who wrote the report urged the Commission to take further action, often meet with EU nations, and enhance money. According to the study, governments should adopt the New European Bauhaus in their national policy.

Parliamentarians also demanded that the concepts of the NEB be made an intrinsic element of all essential future laws, pointing out that the EU is now updating several important rules that will have a long-term impact on the construction industry. The mechanism to be employed for it is up for debate.

But the objective remains the same: to monitor emissions throughout the whole life cycle of a building, from resource extraction and production through transportation and construction to end-of-life.

The Bottom Line

The New European Bauhaus movement has to be mindful of the social crises that might coexist with efforts to progress toward a carbon-neutral society. It is already evident in programs that simultaneously address several demands, such as lowering building energy efficiency and offering social housing, combating ecological damage and the need for meeting places in urban centers, and addressing brain drain and the lack of culture in rural regions.

The movement is about finding oneself in the transition by using what we already have, the natural setting and human ingenuity. Europe’s New Bauhaus Movement will link us by fostering initiatives and bringing together individuals working toward comparable objectives in various cities, regions, and nations.

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