Alert: The Plaza Building will remain closed through Jan. 1, 2025.
Faculty and staff may retrieve items and use copy machines in preparation for finals week with Campus ID badges through the door on the Southwest side across from King Center. Additionally, the Auraria Health Center (link: https://healthcenter1.com) is continuing to operate at a reduced capacity.
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Aspen Workshop
Summer 2025, June 8 - 29
Faculty: Professor Michael Jenson, PhD (michael.jenson@ucdenver.edu)
Course Information: 3-week, extended study 6 credit hours that will fulfill two ARCH or Open Elective requirement.
*Application information information to come.
The Bauhaus in Aspen 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.
Though the Bauhaus existed for only approximately 13 years, the impact of its legacy has been unparalleled within the arts and many circles of social and political discourse. It is considered one of the most influential movements within the realm of art, design, and architecture in the twentieth century. Concepts defined within its curriculum crystalized many of the arguments for the social role of art and architecture that still serve as foundational concepts to navigating our current era of globalization.
Through powerful artistic work, imagery, and dialogue, the Bauhaus has continually caught the revolutionary imagination of subsequent generations of artists while often drawing the “ire” of traditionalists. The tension surrounding its almost mythological status has survived the actual existence of the school for a century.
Outside the social/political connotations of its program and curriculum, the Bauhaus has been equally influential by way of the innovative work of its faculty in disciplines ranging from painting and sculpture to architecture and photography. A central reason for this enduring legacy is that the school articulated a consistent vision regarding the agency of the “collaborative artist” and its potential influence on modern democratic societies.
Herbert Bayer was a great example of the type of collaborative artist that the Bauhaus sought to train. He was first a student, and later a master of one of the workshops at the Bauhaus in Dessau. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, he moved to Berlin for several years and then after moved to New York City. It was during his time in New York that a wealthy businessman named Walter Paepcke offered him a role as head designer in an endeavour he was undertaking at the time in Aspen. Bayer accepted the offer because as Pedre Anders describes in an article on Herbert Bayer, this position was a natural fit for Bayer and his love of Nature:
“His [Bayer’s} decision “to seek his artistic sustenance in nature” is vital to understanding Bayer’s work in Aspen. “The participation in shaping an environment, in dealing with social problems [and] in building a community life,” strongly appealed to him. As a token of goodwill to Aspen’s citizens Bayer offered to redesign houses and offices free of charge according to this agenda, to which The Aspen Times reported that it was “exceptionally good luck to have one of the world’s great designers in our midst”…From Paepcke’s perspective, Bayer became the living proof that Aspen had more to offer than unemployed miners. His activities bore fruit, and Aspen “came back” to life, Bauhaus style.”
With Bayer’s influence as a guiding frame of reference, this workshop will explore the consequences for Aspen, both positive and negative, as many of the Bauhaus principles and ideals became manifest, catapulting this small mountain town into a position to become the highly affluent and globally influential artistic, cultural, and intellectual center that it is today.
