Big Plans!: Modern Types, Dreamers, and Inventors

Ninety years after the Bauhaus first opened its doors in Dessau, Big Plans! Modern Figures, Visionaries, and Inventors examines for the first time the role of the Bauhaus in the early modernist vision of utopia. Not just an experimental forum for the avant-garde, the Bauhaus, once it moved to Dessau, became part of an industrial region that had been a hotbed of idealized planning for the future of humanity since the end of the First World War. This visionary futurist age of Saxony-Anhalt, reflected in its local architecture, industrial production, education and advertising, continued until the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s.

Big Plans! includes correspondence sent from the Bauhaus throughout this local, central German network, tracing connections between Dessau and Magdeburg, Halle (Saale), Leuna, Merseburg, Wolfen and Elbingerorde. The work of Walter Gropius, Xanti Schawinsky, Bruno Taut and Wilhelm Deffke is given particular emphasis, alongside artists, architects, politicians and engineers such as Paul Scheerbart, Josef Albers, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Edith Dinkelmann, Leberecht Migge, Sigfried Ebeling, Friedrich Zollinger, Walter Dexel, Marinne Brandt, Ise Gropius, Hermann Eidenbenz, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Jenny Gertz, Hugo Junkers, Joost Schmidt and Herbert Bayer.