“I chose to interpret the Bauhaus’s presence as something of temporary validity” An interview with Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza

The Brazilian industrial designer Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza was a student, professor and director at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI) in Rio de Janeiro. He has written the books ESDI: biografia de uma ideia (1996) and Notas para uma história do design (1998).

Zoy Anastassakis (ZA), Marcos Martins (MM):
In what way do you consider the Bauhaus a determining influence on the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial’s (ESDI, School of Industrial Design) approach to teaching and learning (curricular or otherwise)? Can you recall a few moments, situations or classroom activities to illustrate your opinion?

Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza (PS):
I am not answering this question directly because my answer would be simple: the Bauhaus was not a determining influence. This opinion may be at odds with that of others; everybody may think or feel about that differently. The question as such is quite problematic since it assumes a positive answer by inquiring how Bauhaus references have determined approaches to teaching and learning at ESDI.

There have been the occasional Bauhaus-influenced professors, cases in point being Daisy Igel and Renina Katz. However, the former, an extraordinary professor, did not remain at the school too long, although she influenced students who later went on to become professors as well. But her association with the Bauhaus came from her education in the United States, from meeting Bauhaus professors who migrated and made their way to various American universities. Josef Albers was one of them.

Yet Konrad Wachsmann and other European architects, though they also had the Bauhaus as a reference, as did Buckminster Fuller, an American she called “Buckie” when he visited Brazil, were as important as her contacts with those former Bauhauslers. Renina Katz, another excellent professor, was a fine artist with ample teaching experience, including at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (faculty of architecture and urban planning), Universidade de São Paulo (FAU/USP). She was very knowledgeable about critical and analytical methods in the teaching of visual arts. The Bauhaus was surely a reference informing her teaching methods, but not the only one. In my opinion, to argue that ESDI’s early formulations were directly influenced by Bauhaus pedagogy would be untrue.

Simply associating the Bauhaus and the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG, Ulm School of Design) with ESDI has all but become a slogan; to me it seems to be a mostly rhetorical matter and the product of an overactive imagination. I find that references to the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm in many places such as Brazil, India and elsewhere are much more visible in relationships that are not exactly pedagogical. There will always be a preliminary or basic course –  whatever denomination is adopted – that harks back to the Bauhaus. But that alone does not imply an objective impact of Bauhaus pedagogy on the initial pedagogical makeup of those peripheral schools. In fact, in many cases, what happened was the mere appropriation of a nomenclature, almost like an attestation of modernist currency. This wasn’t the case with ESDI, broadly speaking.

Even the pedagogical scheme for the Escola Técnica de Criação (ETC, School of Technical Design) at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ, Museum of Modern Art), which was regarded as one of the sources of ESDI’s project, owes more to Ulm than to the Bauhaus since its creation involved Otl Aicher and Tomás Maldonado. By that point (the first half of the 1950s), they were working on developing the school in Ulm. Maldonado, who delivered lectures in 1994 at both MAM/RJ and ESDI, told me and Karl Heinz Bergmiller during a conversation that, although he did participate in laying the foundations, his role had been overestimated. This implies the assumption that Aicher had the most input on the proposal.

But on the other hand, as far as I am concerned, there are obvious criteria which are also rooted in pedagogical elements that to a great extent do not conform with German standards, and American influences instead prevail, possibly coming from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The MoMA was a key model for the MAM/RJ, perhaps through the mediation of the person who created the museum’s introductory catalog, Elaine Lustig, a great graphic designer then based in the United States who had close ties to the American museum. This is all guesswork, and in keeping with current trends in this country, one might argue that there is no “scientific evidence” to that end.

However, the proposition contained in the pedagogical scheme for the Escola Técnica de Criação is definitely not derived from the Bauhaus, nor is it altogether coming from Ulm. The scheme is available in my book on ESDI, [1] in a reproduction taken from the introductory catalogue for MAM/RJ, few copies of which I believe still exist elsewhere than in the museum.

It would be better to be less pretentious and scholarly and to accept that whatever there is of the Bauhaus at ESDI and other schools is much more a matter of inspiration than of direct reference. It is worth recalling what Bergmiller says about the influence of the HfG Ulm on ESDI as he insists that a transposition from Germany to Brazil would be impossible, not least due to the differences between the professors involved in either project. He also noted that such differences were essentially of a cultural nature.

Yet, ESDI initially attempted to formulate a rather comprehensive curriculum, comprising disciplines hitherto not considered for courses focusing on creative fields, not even at the Bauhaus, such as cultural anthropology (José Bonifácio Martins Rodrigues, sociologist), operational research (Euryalo Cannabrava, engineer), introduction to logic (Jorge Emmanuel Barbosa, mathematician), psychology and theory of perception (Antonio Gomes Penna, psychologist), verbal communication (Zuenir Ventura, journalist), theory of information (Décio Pignatari, semiologist and poet), theory of manufacturing and materials, and others. Moreover, disciplines’ designations such as “composition” and “expression” were replaced, in content as well as objectives, with visual “methodology,” “analysis of means of representation,” “contemporary visual culture,” and others.

This variety of knowledge categorized by fields was not an influence of the Bauhaus, but rather of the HfG Ulm. And this was what distinguished the HfG Ulm from the Bauhaus. This was one of the reasons for the disagreements between Max Bill, the school’s original director and a Bauhaus alumnus, and the so-called younger professors – Tomás Maldonado, Claude Schnaidt, Martin Krampen, Hanno Kesting, Horst Rittel, and Gui Bonsiepe – as well as those more integrated with design-related fields like Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, and Walter Zeischegg. Calling them younger is something of a euphemism because the age differences, with the exception of Bonsiepe, weren’t significant all that. Certainly, in addition to egos, the confrontation involved a technical update in relation to the Bauhaus, but also a very clear political definition of the school, which historians such as Charles Jencks considered as militating for a “new left.”[2]

The influences observed initially at ESDI could not as yet be seen as politically left-leaning, as would be the case for a short period after 1964. Yet it opposed the previous traditions of the main courses in visual arts and crafts that had preceded it in Rio de Janeiro like those of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (1816, Imperial Academy of Fine Arts), later renamed Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (1890, National Academy of Fine Arts), and the understudied, although progressive Liceu de Artes e Ofícios do Rio de Janeiro (1856, College for Arts and Crafts).

The latter was the brainchild of architect Francisco Joaquim Béthencourt da Silva and much lauded and supported by Rui Barbosa who, in turn, possessed great knowledge of the visual arts and crafts pedagogies of his time, notably those originating in England. Rui Barbosa was arguably one of the first Brazilian industrialist politicians, and he was truly obsessed with developing a type of education based on design, freedom of expression, and creative freedom revolving around participative learning rather than compartmentalized, established knowledge. A free form of teaching based on hands-on activities was proposed in Brazil earlier than the 1950s. It may not have been valued before that since the educational reform carried out at the transition from empire to republic was ultimately under much greater influence from Benjamin Constant and his positivism than the liberalism of Barbosa’s propositions. Since then, despite lacking the intellectual stature of Benjamin Constant, who moreover was a great admirer of Barbosa’s, the positivist Brazilian military have insisted on bringing misfortune upon the country.

The republican educational reform, aside from being positivist, was authoritarian and elitist in character, postponing more creative educational initiatives. As for more liberal, creative forms of teaching, curious connections can be made between renewing the Protestant approach and traditional Catholic education in the country, as Gilberto Freyre did in Ordem e Progresso.[3]

Pedagogical renewals in Brazil were in many cases visibly tied to Protestantism – not to be confused with Neo-Pentecostal Evangelicals, who have seldom considered working on education –, and of course there were influences from England, Germany, the United States, and from socialist-leaning, reformist sectors in Italy.

But I would rather make a few remarks on something which may have preceded ESDI’s inception and discuss an influence the Bauhaus may have had on the ideas of designers of my generation. To this end, I will rely on an analogy with another idea presumed to be universal or at least to have been brought from Europe in an attempt at civilizing us or serving as a reference for us. As I have said, the direct influence of a Bauhaus-based pedagogy is part of an often-repeated mythology in different countries, situations, and circumstances. This reminds me of a supposed “declaration of human rights,” which is cited often – and quite frantically so these days –, although it never existed, coupled with a refrain repeated ad nauseam by many of the most loathsome national politicians: the “democratic legal state,” which never came to pass in this country either. I will not get started on the latter, or else I might never stop.

There never was a “declaration of human rights.” There was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen issued during the French Revolution, and according to an active participant in the assembly that birthed it (Adrien Duquesnoy, the delegate from Nancy, quoted by Christine Fauré in Les déclarations des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, de 1789 [4]), it resulted from the worst of many drafts, because it attempted something the bourgeoisie always strived for but never achieved: consensus. Whenever a “pedagogy of the Bauhaus” gets brought up, I believe no one knows exactly what that means either.

Is there only one Bauhaus and one pedagogy?

Maldonado had argued, in his correspondence with Gropius which was published in the Ulm magazine (no. 8/9 and 10/11, 1962), that contrary to what the great architect believed, he did not see the school and its pedagogy as having only one character; he found it to be “multifaceted.” Indeed, seeking consensus of any kind between Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Hannes Meyer, and so many others from that school who had distinct artistic, formal, political, and ideological orientations seems a task as arduous as it is illusory, yet another quest for impossible consensus. The attempt to rekindle the idea of a single-minded Bauhaus once again seems like an attempt to revive the idea put forward by Gropius in 1962, in his correspondence with Maldonado, that an idealized, successful, stabilized Bauhaus had been established in Dessau, free from the mystical, intuitionist excesses of Johannes Itten and the ascetic, Calvinist formalisms of Theo van Doesburg of the first phase of the school, and in many senses soiled by the radical leftist political attitudes observed during the school’s third phase, which began under the direction of Hannes Meyer and was later concluded by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Going back to the analogy with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, this resurrection indeed appears to indicate a sort of penitence for the amount of absurdities bred by two ideas which refer to the Bauhaus and its German successor, the HfG Ulm, as seminal references to what may be called modern design: industrialism, an ideology which attempted to unduly appropriate the idea of progress or pass for its epitome, and modernist formalism, a short, shameless road to consumerism through styling, a notion as criticized as it is misunderstood and presumed to be North American, although it is really essentially rooted in the Bauhaus itself.

Behind this penitence is the prior relinquishment of the political and social interpretations that have always been at the root of this modern design, particularly through the social-democratic discussions and mobilizations of late 19th-century Germany, in a bid to establish a bourgeois republic that may bring to fruition at least some of the claims of the Declaration of Rights of (the bourgeois) Man. Should considerations of the pedagogies attempted in Germany fail to observe these aspects, which include the very formation and affirmation of the country, then everything will be restricted to isolated facts and objects, including the Bauhaus itself, which after all was not the only school of design in existence in Germany at that time. Considerations based on this isolation were exactly what bred an American interpretation of the Bauhaus, coming from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York basically put forth by Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr, at the time the museum’s young, dynamic director.

It led to the development of an American concept of “good design,” which differed in some aspects from the German concept of gute Form. Both ultimately express almost the same thing in a formal sense, they merely differ in the fact that whereas the former refers to products which, on grounds of their formal quality, would be worthy of being in the design collections of museums like the MoMA or in refrigerated Knoll or Hermann Miller stores, and touching them would be a privilege reserved only to those who could afford them, the latter referred much more to the necessary qualifications a product’s design and manufacturing should possess in order to attain that degree of worthiness. The former, one might argue, yields a Bauhaus style whose offshoots even include formalisms such as styling and streamlining. Of the latter there derives an Ulm style whose ultimate visual representation were Braun products and more recently Apple products – styles and formalisms to suit the tastes of the sophisticated bourgeoise.

Going back again to the analogy with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, one may argue that these rights have never come to pass anywhere in the world, just as Bauhaus teaching was never really implemented elsewhere than at the school itself. So what is their meaning and their worth, since they are periodically invoked? The Rights of Man are believed to have universal value but, despite the democratic beliefs built around them, they are not equal nor omnipresent, not even in the West where they were born. Whenever dominant politics change, so do the very meanings of these rights, characterizing the belief deposited upon them as a sort of militancy that borders on political partisanship or endowing them with religious meaning. All of this carries a kind of transcendence which ultimately really does exert a near-mystical hegemony. Resurrections are part of this state of mind, as are commemorations and celebrations. The idea of in-depth research into a Bauhaus influence in the tropics, 100 years after the school’s creation, to an extent derives from this devout outlook. Examining the past is a risky undertaking.

Here, I remember and quote an idea from Pedro Malan, a dignified and respected – at least as far as I am concerned – high-ranking Brazilian civil servant (Central Bank governor and Minister of Finance), for whom “in Brazil even the past is uncertain.” Looking at the past without considering it to be a reference for the present or future is problematic. In the past few years, I worked on pulling together every text and reference I have ever used in my teaching activities. That turned out to be a long analysis and a critique of modern design. Therefore, the Bauhaus is an important part of that work, and it could not be otherwise. However, I chose to interpret this presence as something of temporary validity, and therefore mutating and mutable. I think of Riobaldo, a character from the novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) by author João Guimarães Rosa, who says: “The most important and most beautiful thing about the world is this: that people aren’t always the same, that they haven’t been finished yet – but that they are ever-changing.”[5] And so are ideas, fortunately.

I find it curious how, in perpetuating the past, one fails to realize that one is killing that which they believe they are valuing. At the end of my whole critique of modern design, I believe its problems do not even reside in the overvaluing of material culture or in the excessive Western objectivity stemming thereof. Rather they emerge from overlooking a more precise analysis of the concept of time that governed the whole implementation of an industrialism that was rather insane for it endeavored to impose so many rules it wound up being rendered rule-less itself by the many things it had condemned to oblivion.

In a strict observation of its origins, what makes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen so interesting is perhaps the fact that at its onset, it carries a sense of humanity in the simplest, most elementary sense possible: “All men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” And this primitivism, coupled with a nobility of feelings typical of the Enlightenment, couples together these two sides of the enlightened man and makes him feel at once simple and complex, close to his fellow men, yet endowed with an understanding possible only through his own enlightenment, that is, through theoretical and philosophical development. Thus, in a rather European way as well, he feels authoritarian, yet generous, the Marxist washing off his colonialist soul.

The idea of there being a defined, definitive pedagogical conceptualization stemming from the Bauhaus could also be looked at from a similar perspective. Even though its existence is put in question, it is insistently said to have influenced the teaching of architecture and particularly of modern design, around the world. This influence, as well as the presence of the belief in the Rights of Man, is a fact. However, it is also a fact that, depending on who you ask what that consists of, the answers will be many and different from one another. I remember that when I was a student in São Paulo – in the 1950s/60s – and there would be minimum grades and grade point averages for admission to graduate courses, there would also be so-called outliers, that is, candidates who had achieved those grades and grade point averages, yet weren’t admitted because all slots had been taken. In the case of FAU/USP, in the early 1960s, a compromise was attempted by assigning those candidates to a new school of architecture set to be created in Taubaté, a city in the state of São Paulo. During talks to that end, which ultimately fell through, the school’s would-be president was asked what the new school’s approach would be, answered with a magic word: “Bauhaus.” Right then and there he should have morphed into a super architect, which I did not find to be the case. But “Bauhaus,” the way it was said, sounded like “Shazam.” That was when I realized, maybe for the first time, the sense of belief and fiction present in everything having to do with modernity and which is imprinted on the rationalist schools and approaches to teaching applied arts, architecture itself, and design. One word was all it took, no further explanations required, to get ideas, minds, and spirits to flock around it. Thus, I reflected sometime later and maybe a bit more disenchanted and mature, that should be worth something. An event from decades earlier in Germany, whose meaning was encapsulated in one single word, should have a character at least as real as Our Lady of Aparecida, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Fátima, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and others: the same virgin, appearing in different countries, under different guises. These apparitions, through simple invocation, seem sufficient for good souls to keep their beliefs steady and strong, with no further explanations needed. They can neither be disregarded nor ignored.

After all, it seems that a universal character of the Rights of Man, and of any other idea that purports to belong in such a category, does not reside in its imprecise content, but in its sense of representing something which allows itself to be employed, under various circumstances, as a slogan, as an efficacious, effective tool for saying no and protesting, for opposing the unacceptable, for defining a resistance. This negative character of the Rights of Man becomes more visible than their presumed positivity. And here one may remember the congenital negativity of modern design, which did not originally manifest itself, as some more immediate-minded critics and historians would have it, in the Bauhaus. Way before the school’s inception and evidencing that it was all about a political and therefore practical idea, Hermann Muthesius, co-founder of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen), had set out, if not exactly to define what design and its teaching was or was not, but to establish the kind of design and teaching that were of interest to a then very young German state and hat would serve its development. And what was of interest was, to a much greater extent, something that was not yet present as a product or industrial object and was therefore much more easily defined through negation, that is, through a rigorous critique of that which was present. One can conclude that this set of ideals for modern design, which includes the Bauhaus, related much more to the political and economic objectives of that time than to actual formal or aesthetic standards later assumed, and naively so, as being universal. And for the most part, whenever an alleged imposition of the ideas of Gropius, the Bauhaus, Bill, the HfG Ulm, etc. is met with either criticism or praise, reference is usually made to formal questions within an excessively poor and limited view of the idea of material culture that reoriented all Western development since the industrial revolution.

Again, as to the Rights of Man, it is known that its positive contents – the very rights inscribed and declared therein – are disputable on grounds of their mythologization of the individual, of an alleged construction of happiness as their ultimate purpose, and above all because they purport to universally teach the meaning and the sense of life, establishing beforehand that their ethics are above all others and above all suspicion. In the end, it is a textbook constructed by bourgeois intellectuals designed to preserve their Western prerogatives. But their negative function, which occasionally may be revolutionary or insurrectional as is more often the case lately, also has the visible task of creating cracks in the totalitarian, globalizing and commercial satisfaction that politics has become, as have, for that matter, the contemporary philosophies themselves or other activities of formal expression, such as art, design, and architecture. Not all those who invoke the Rights of Man are even thoroughly familiar with them. Not all those who heap praise on Bauhaus formalism are even aware of its origins. Not everyone looks at these phenomena taking into account their origin and their Western, bourgeois, and occasionally authoritarian meaning.

But they find in their simple enunciation an argument and an instrument that is always on hand, available for any cause that may arise. It is therefore a dangerous argument, because it serves everyone, both the power and those that oppose it. Therefore, it is important to consider the circumstances: will there be occasions that will justify an imposition of those rights as a means of preventing a greater evil? Will there be occasions when they will serve as an argument and a slogan precisely against the reaction to that greater evil, a reaction some argue will almost always be uncontrollable once it has supposedly fulfilled its immediate function? Will there be situations in which the taste for the simplicity and formal reticence brought about at the Bauhaus and particularly at its successor, the HfG Ulm, may be made to resurface? And will this remain restrained to the bounds of good taste and therefore to a limited comprehension of its meaning? These questions demonstrate that attributing a sanctimonious, arrogant universality to the Rights of Man or to a centennial artistic pedagogy is ultimately tantamount to giving up on insurrection and protest due to a critique of said arrogance or to the political meaning contained in the minimalism of objects proposed by designers, even if it may lead to practices disputed in their essence.

One might therefore interpret that universality from two different standpoints: the first would be that instead of assuming a congenital universality to the Rights of Man, one should search them for an ongoing universality, something constantly in process, which has not been and maybe should never be finished. The second interpretation would be that the Rights of Man must not be construed as an asset or a finite quality that is passively accepted, awarded, or even conquered. If they do possess a universalizing character, it must reside in the fact that they are ideas which are motivating and which promote new orders and necessary disorders. Their universal value, then, resides in them and only in them, rather than in references or dependences on representations instituted in their wake.

Likewise, a pedagogy of design does not exist without a practical result, and this, especially now, is always ongoing, in process. A universalizing character of the Declaration of the Rights of Man is an element of politics and not something bound by some theory, as it has been transformed and interpreted by academic knowledge or by the UN in its endless theses and bureaucratic statements. All these events are ideological; they were born practical and operative and have evolved organically through long political developments that have led to radical questions, reforms, and political, pedagogical, spiritual, and formal rebellions that have since been present and cited in the justifications to any action in any situation that may present itself in the face of many activities such as, for instance, modern design.

Here one must distinguish two differing features of what is universalizing and what may be universalized. The latter approaches universal quality as synonymous with truth, and precisely for that reason, it will always be put in question, being liable to interpretation as abuse, as fraud, or at least as being questionable. On the other hand, what is purported to be universalizing does not encounter issues when it comes to legitimacy, because no pretensions underlie it; it is simply imagined to exist and to do things. And the occasional correction, if one might call it that, is ultimately gauged on its strength and the intensity of its effects. It is in this sense that the Rights of Man may be interpreted as a strong and effective universalizing idea. When they are thus construed, it no longer becomes important to know whether they can or cannot be universalized, that is, whether they can be taken as enunciations of truths applicable to all the cultures in the world. The clear-cut answer to this would be: no.

But they certainly produce a universal effect that serves as an unconditional weapon, a tool of negation in whose name a combat is a priori fair, and resistance is legitimate. Perhaps, in this sense, the good combat against consumerism, false, boundless marketing and advertising, insane industrialization and predatory industrialism, initiated immediately after World War II, was a clear motivation for attributing a universalizing character to some limited and radical sectors of modern design that were partly present both at the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm as well as at ESDI. This was certainly not an attitude common to all or even most designers. However, since so-called market players and the more histrionic sectors of academia have chosen to spread that belief, it is not exactly a bad idea to now impute to it, as a compensation and a counterattack, the monumental failure these other universal illusions perverted and espoused by them have turned out to be, among them that the world could finally be a big central state, the sole distributor of speculative and financial benefits and punishments, or else a big business, an endless universe of services, a huge, inexhaustible market, a global franchise governed by adjectivizations devoid of meaning and an absolute incompetence in exercising even the good, old concept of a project.

If the Declaration of the Rights of Man has been gradually transformed into a political argument and as such remains valid, this means to bring it into a territory of spirituality. Perhaps one might argue the same regarding a proposition such as the Bauhaus, not so much due to its imprecise, unstable pedagogy, as was the case with the pedagogies of HfG Ulm or ESDI at their early stages, but because it constituted itself as an experimental school, open to its own times and liberated from the bureaucratic, pachydermial issues that govern the major universities and their academic units (filing cabinets).

ZA, MM:
Inversely, please comment on aspects of the models and pedagogical practices of ESDI that brought something new to the table as compared to the Bauhaus model.

PS:
I believe that the answer to the first question covers much of what is being asked here. One of the key aspects of ESDI’s early phase (I would argue that that phase lasted until 1972/73, when the school’s integration with the UERJ, the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, was considered) was the curricular instability mentioned in the answer to the first question. Everyone seems to think the school’s curriculum was changed after 1968 as a result of an essentially political mobilization by professors and particularly by students.

In fact, the changes to the initial curriculum to be made in 1968 were a proposal from the professors themselves, and it didn’t even come to pass, not so much on grounds of its qualities or the lack thereof, but for the simple fact that at that point students would have found any curriculum unacceptable for elementary political reasons: any proposition would have been deemed authoritarian. This was an issue of the times. Although this negative predisposition was in place, that may have been the time when the various pedagogical models in use in the specific field of design were studied and criticized the most. Those unaware became aware, and those aware became even more so, of what the Bauhaus had been and what the HfG Ulm was, after all it wasn’t yet extinct. Also, American and Scandinavian propositions were discussed, and there was even the assumption that there was some kind of pedagogical proposal in Italy to that end. The meetings to outline a new curriculum were long, endless, at times creative and fun, at others infuriatingly haphazard and fruitless, all under a dictatorship that was growing more radical and brutal outside the bounds of the school.

The attempts to create a proprietary, national model as opposed to a presumed “imported model” took on features at times interesting and at others ridiculous. There was a bit of everything: some futurology, some pastism, some rampant scientism and witch-doctoring, and some common sense from time to time. But I believe that after 1972, when a curriculum was implemented, that was as poorly patched up as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, according to the aforementioned Adrien Duquesnoy, the question was no longer brought up of whether the school was a daughter of the HfG Ulm and the granddaughter of the Bauhaus.

Though problematic, the curriculum was what was possible then. A new generation of professors was prematurely beginning their careers, virtually all freshly graduated from the school itself, inexperienced when it came to didactics, but widely experienced in discussions, not prone to submission and yet able to comprehend something that might be truly a heritage of the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm, though somewhat shrouded in myth: their aversion to formal discipline. The very curriculum proposed was met with little respect, even though it paradoxically served as the basis for the creation of a minimum curriculum in design made official by the Ministry of Education and Culture. Those who created it doubted it, and those who made it official did not know what it meant. This aversion to formal discipline also included a behavior already observed throughout the first decade of the school, during its most conflictual phase: no professor at the school had ever even considered imposing disciplinary sanctions on any students, even amid situations as critical as the 1968 general assemblies.

That first generation of professors accepted this practice as a lesson, and I personally believe they also accepted the idea that teaching could be conflictual and, precisely for that reason, healthy. The conflict-ridden histories of the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm were perceived influences on ESDI, not so much on its teaching program, but in the behavior of its board (Carmen Portinho, an engineer, and her immediate successors, all of them designers hailing from the school itself) and of ample sectors of its faculty. Concerning the syllabus or something of that sort, nothing was ever linked to the Bauhaus to any great extent. Concerning internal behavior, the tolerance and acceptance towards differences somehow harked back to the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm, though idealized as forms of experimental schools.

ZA, MM:
What reference to the Bauhaus do you think has survived when it comes to the configuration of ESDI’s educational practices? And what was there initially and ceased to be dominant later?

PS:
I do not wish to refer to the school as it is today, because it has been six years since I retired, and I am no longer part of its day-to-day. But it has been a few years since I have seen any Bauhaus reference in the configuration of its educational practices, and I no longer see any internal behavioral references like the ones I mentioned above. I find that the school’s inclusion into a formal university structure stripped it of much of its vital energy, which resided in its not being committed to “getting it right.”

I always like to point out that at the end of the crisis that led to the closing of the HfG Ulm, a proposal was made for the school to continue within the University of Stuttgart. Working there, by the way, was Max Bense, who had contacts and close ties with the HfG Ulm and who had also related very well to Brazilian concretism and to ESDI itself during its early phase, where he developed a mythological course comprehended and assimilated by few at the time. The proposal was rejected by everyone at the HfG Ulm. Max Bill, who by then had already parted ways with the school and who is now quite idolized – one legend even has it he is “a leftist” – was favorable to it, perhaps even to oppose, once again, the true leftist stance assumed by the school after he left the board. Otl Aicher was categorical in stating that to accept it would be to condemn the school to live under the “misery of major university institutions, always incapable of a true confrontation with practice.”[6]

But by then ESDI had had a possibly anachronistic structure for a while, including a preliminary course whose nature was either unknown or misinterpreted even by those who taught there. I even heard absurdities such as an interpretation according to which this preliminary course should be a step at which to match students’ levels. Under its original conception, whether at the Bauhaus, the HfG Ulm, or ESDI, the preliminary course was proposed as a period of experience-sharing and the exposure of differences. Whatever unity there was should stem from the critiquing of such characteristics and not from the imposition of previous concepts which, after all, not even the faculty agreed upon.

Such was the attitude that enabled the creative coexistence of the different personalities and ideas of professors such as Karl Heinz Bergmiller, Alexandre Wollner, Aloisio Magalhães, Renina Katz, Frederico de Morais, Zuenir Ventura, Décio Pignatari, and so many others, equally different among themselves, in the second generation of professors. Seeking unity or consensus was never a characteristic of the school during its first decades, and that remained the case for quite a while. I believe this has been lost – this right to incoherence or even the ability to question consistency as a fundamental element of the project. Oddly enough, this diversity was visible whenever a few students, from generations that followed those of the first six or seven years of the school, would complain about what they called “excessive freedom” allowed by the professors or about differing, contradicting opinions regarding their assignments. They had to be persuaded, mostly by the school board which traditionally handled student gripes and foul moods that freedom does not accommodate lack nor excess and that the contradiction could be a creative influx. On the other hand, this was another ever-present feature of the school, no less due to its small size: the free transit among professors, students, and the board. This also seems to always have been the case at the muse schools of the Bauhaus and the HfG Ulm.

So, regarding this question, I have answered it rather backwards, because I believe I have spoken more about what used to be there at first and about what was still left, at least up until the time I left. In terms of curricular content, of course, much of the knowledge that was initially provided no longer made any sense. It was always for this reason that I insisted, ever since I was the school’s president, that it should once again dare do something and abolish the notion of a curriculum, refresh all its teaching each year or within relatively short timespans, evaluate itself internally with ample input from professors, students and staff in that process.

I conducted a self-evaluation process along these lines during my stint as ESDI’s director, and I promoted an external evaluation conducted by a commission of three professors specializing in higher education. That was quite fruitful, not least because of the need to explain our idiosyncrasies and make them explicit to people outside the school because we considered ourselves eccentric, fun, and creative, and at the same time we were so uncommunicative when it came to our own supposed qualities. Perhaps this occasionally made for unwarranted intellectual arrogance – even though arrogance is necessary at times – which is also a heritage from the Bauhaus and from Ulm, one not easily understood and assimilated by the contemporary faculty and students alike. I find that the school today is much more of an UERJ course in industrial design than it is Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial. This is the natural development of things, even though being the good modernist that I am, I do not appreciate this kind of development very much.

 Zoy Anastassakis (1974) is a Brazilian designer and anthropologist. Between 2016 and 2018, she was director of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (ESDI/UERJ), where she is as an associate professor. At ESDI, she coordinates the Laboratório de Design e Antropologia (Laboratory of design and anthropology). Together with Marcos Martins, she is the author of a book on ESDI’s experimentations from 2016 to 2018 which was published in the Bloomsbury series Design in Dark Times.

Marcos Martins is a designer and associate professor at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of which he was deputy director from 2016 to 2018. His post-doctoral research at Princeton University investigated social media’s interface design through a historical and critical analysis. Together with Zoy Anastassakis, he authored a book published in the Bloomsbury series Design in Dark Times about a time of crisis and experimentation in which they were at the helm of ESDI.