ABW: Aspen/Bauhaus Workshop

Friday, May 22 - Saturday, June 13*

*Final Studio Presentations: Monday, June 15

Faculty: Professor Michael Jenson, PhD ([email protected])

Course Information: 3-week, extended study 6 credit hours that will fulfill two ARCH or Open Elective requirement. The final design studio presentation will be held in Denver on Monday, June 15.

Herbert Bayer Diagram of the Field of Vision

The Aspen/Bauhaus Workshop

The Aspen Workshop was founded by CAP in the summer of 2011 to offer students a unique opportunity to work in the offices of local architectural firms and alongside some of the nation’s leading architects in Colorado's Roaring Fork region to gain insight into their design process, studio culture, and professional practice. In parallel to this experience, students will now also learn of Aspen’s history and its connection to the Bauhaus, especially in relation to the life and work of Herbert Bayer. There will be lectures, readings, and field trips exploring how Bauhaus’s design principles reshaped a failing former mining town in the mid 20th century into one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.

Key Takeaways:

Learn the interdisciplinary design principles of the Bauhaus and utilize them in a brief 3 week design charette.
Work closely with local architecture/planning firms to understand how the modernist design studio paradigm has been transformed to meet the needs of firms designing in mountain communities today.
Explore the environmental and aesthetic legacy of Herbert Bayer (Designer/Artist/Environmentalist/Bauhaus Faculty member) as he played a key role in bringing the ideas of the Bauhaus to America and subsequently transformed Aspen into the global environmentally conscious urban center it is today.
Tour historic institutions such as the Aspen music pavilion and the Resnick center to understand how a diverse and innovative design vision transformed Aspen from a historically sleepy mining town to a modern global powerhouse of arts, culture, and outdoor recreation.
Be exposed to the innovative planning, design, and sustainable ideas necessary to influence the creation of a culturally diverse urban center within a environmentally sensitive and beautiful mountainous landscape.

Aspen/Bauhaus Workshop Video Overview

Program Information

There will be two courses offered during the program:

Course 01: (Visualization) The visual principles and color theory of the Bauhaus.

This course will study the primary visual principles of the Bauhaus and color theory taught in the foundational interdisciplinary (Vorkurs) course at the Bauhaus. During the course, students will undertake several exercises and a small “capstone” project that explore how Bauhaus principles as well as utilized by Bayer in his geographic atlas (among other projects) can serve as paradigms for utilizing color and visualizing and presenting information in their own work.

Course 02: (History/Theory) The Bauhaus and its influence in America:

This will be a “concise” historically and theoretically-focused course on the Bauhaus, its influence, and the propagation of its societal vision and design principles throughout the globe in the latter half of the 20th century. It will also explore how these ideas were transplanted and transformed in countries like America through émigrés such as Herbert Bayer to radically influence the aesthetic sensibility of many American urban centers.