Good evening everyone:

Last night, I sent along the first of my two talks on the German Fuggerei – Europe’s oldest continuous “social housing” project.  I wanted tonight to send along the second part.

“A Tapestry of Connection – Part II: The Bauhaus, Fuggerei, and the Layers of Home”

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Thanks to European Union President Ursula van der Leyden, Count Fuggerei, and the leadership of the Fuggerei Foundation.

It’s an honor to be here this afternoon. I want to pick up where I left off at last night’s celebration but tie it back to the elegant remarks of President van der Leyden about the European New Bauhaus.

The American Version of the New Bauhaus

My connection to the original Bauhaus began even before I was born. My father was an architect. In 1941, he was having a beer in a Chicago tavern when he struck up a conversation with a quiet, but striking man. The stranger was Lazlo Moholy Nagy, a Hungarian painter and photographer who had been recruited to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1923 by Walter Gropius, but had fled Germany in 1935 and worked his way to Chicago.

Moholy Nagy had established what he called “The New Bauhaus in America,” modeled on the interdisciplinary principles of the German original. My father had spent his last six years in such an environment –the Cranbrook Academy, founded by the great Finnish architect and planner Eliel Saarinen. It was both graduate school and a living community of artisans, in which architecture and sculpture. . .  metalworking and ceramics . . .painting and weaving . . . were inter-braided into a seamless curriculum and artistic method. Just like the Bauhaus.

Moholy Nagy insisted that my father should join the New Bauhaus and lead its architecture and design program. After the fifth beer, my father agreed.

A week later, my father found himself at a five-story mansion with a questionable tavern on the ground floor. Moholy Nagy greeted him, waved away the women at work at the bar, and took my father to each of the higher floors – each one the center of the school’s departments: the visual arts, sculpture, and architecture, which had to share space with metalworking.

The stacking of the various disciplines floor-by-floor provides a useful metaphor for what the New Bauhaus sought to accomplish: distinct crafts connecting and combining . . . intermingling, and interweaving . . .  all in one place.

It reminds us that artisans and craftsmen . . . housing and services . . . ideas and traditions . . . families and communities . . . all thrive in environments of connection.  It was true when the Fuggerei was founded in 1522, it was true in 1923 and 1941, and it is true today.

The Influence of Fuggerei’s Principles and Practices

As I said last night, the key to the endurance of the Fuggerei is its conception of both the person and the home, realized in five fundamental elements.  

I focused last evening on the Fuggerei’s elements of social connection. I wanted to turn today to  the Fuggerei elements related to design, art, and craft, which were repeated and amplified in the original Bauhaus and the New American Bauhaus and continue to resonate today, as President van der Leyden so eloquently described.  

Element 1: Designing at human scale

 Let me begin with the First Principle: Designing at the human scale

 The Fuggerei recognized from the outset the importance of using small spaces to create aesthetically-pleasing, healthful, and comfortable living conditions, all essential to a “life with dignity.”

A similar sensibility animated what some view as one of first great examples of humanistic town planning: Pienza, Italy; a Tuscan hill town laid out by Pope Pius II in the 15^thcentury. In seeking to create the ideal Renaissance city, the Pope established planning principles that would later be adopted throughout Europe.

Both Pienza and the Fuggerei break up the monotony of visual sight-lines, providing a sense of surprise and delight. Both feel intimate. Both place residents within ready reach of the street.

 Leap forward six centuries and we see that same spirit in what Americans call the“ New Urbanism” – planned communities in which the streets are narrow, walkable. . . the houses are enveloped in green spaces . . . the public spaces invites residents to linger. One of the first of those communities is Seaside, in northern Florida:

Principle 2:Embracing environmental sustainability and harmony with the natural environment

That brings me to the Second Principle: Embracing  environmental sustainability and harmony with the natural environment

Although tucked into the heart of the city, the Fuggerei is infused with green space and natural light.

Fuggerei’s harmony reminds me of another community designed and built to ensure that its homes and shops are in a direct relationship with the natural environment – Poundbury, England, a model of environmental sustainability conceived and built by Prince Charles.

Poundbury is inspired by the idea of the “environmental transect” – a seam that preserves the integrity of open space, while connecting it directly to the identity of the town. It recognizes that although urban and rural ecosystems are distinct, they lie on a continuum in which the man-made environment gradually gives way to, and incorporates, the natural environment, and vice versa.

Principle 3: Celebrating artisanship

 Let me then turn to the Third Principle: Celebrating artisanship

Over centuries, it has been clear that humans need to create and make as much as they need to touch nature. Indeed, the Fuggerei was designed to “house the poor labourers and artisans of Augsburg,” and workshops and small businesses in the community persist today:

This spirit of artisanship and craft was also essential to all the manifestations of the Bauhaus, and it has been expanded in many cities to the scale of a neighborhood. Let me offer one example.

The ceramicist Theaster Gates enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success when he burst on the arts scene 25 years ago as a potter. Theaster began using the proceeds from his pottery sales to purchase real estate in his Chicago neighborhood.

He started by converting a vacant bank into a community gathering place, library, and event center. He then began to rehabilitate neglected homes and construct new housing.

He has moved on to develop new businesses based on ceramics, woodworking, and construction. In all his projects, he has hired local workers, enabled them and other artists to live in the neighborhood, created supportive community programming, and begun to build a vision of Black ownership and identity in which Black residents not only participate in civic life, but also own the community’s real estate assets.

Principle 4: Creating places to strengthen social connection, bridge across difference, and connect to one’s history

And –

Principle 5: Ensuring that the community’s least fortunate residents have the supports they need to live full and productive lives”

I spoke last night about the fourth and fifth Fuggerei principles. The Fourth Element is creating places to strengthen social cohesion, bridge across difference, and connect to one’s history. The Fifth is ensuring that the community’s least fortunate residents have the supports they need to live full and productive lives.

 I wanted to add to the examples I mentioned last night from Washington DC and New York City one from my hometown of Detroit. It pulls together both elements.

 The Complete Community: A Case Example of Marygrove

In a struggling neighborhood in Northwest Detroit, the Kresge Foundation has pulled together the local school district, the mayor’s office, and businesses to create a neighborhood hub called Marygrove.  

Once a closed private college campus, the site now integrates childcare, a Kindergarten through 12^th grade school, an arts and cultural center, a community health clinic, a small business incubator, and housing. These, in turn, connect to neighborhood businesses . ..  to a bike trail, green space, and a park . . . and to additional housing.

The Marygrove campus dedicates the same attention to the five constituent elements that the Fuggerei has.  And it does so with the same sense of beauty, human-centered design, and respect for nature.  

In America, we have too often suffered from a collective amnesia about how we can best forge a healthful relationship to place. So now, our challenge is to re-learn the ecologies of place – the power of enduring concurrence.  The journey from Fuggerei to the Bauhaus to Marygrove is that journey of rediscovery.

Conclusion

I end where I began; thinking of the layers of the New Bauhaus building my father found in Chicago eighty years ago, with different practices stacked atop one another, but working in concert.  

The magic of the Fuggerei is that it is not simply a collection of five discrete elements, any more than the Bauhaus was a collection of distinct craft and artistic disciplines.  It is instead a tapestry that stitches those elements into a seamless whole. It is not just a village within a city, but a construct for achieving human potential – a construct that is as timeless as itis powerful.

So, once again, congratulations to you all for your vision, your persistence, and your stewardship. And thank you for letting me join you.

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