Like Kandinsky before him, Kasimir Malevich arrived at the Bauhaus already wielding an impressive international reputation. His trip to Germany in the spring of 1927 saw him visit both Dessau and Berlin; while in the former he met with Gropius and was able to arrange for the publication of what would be the eleventh book in the Bauhausbücher series: The Non-objective World (Die gegenstandslose Welt).
As a major center of iconic postwar architecture, Berlin has featured frequently in the Blue Crow Media catalog, with various offerings covering the city’s Modernist and Brutalist architecture, as well as its fascinating Cold War-era U-Bahn stations. Brutalist Berlin, out this month, transforms and expands the corresponding map into a proper full-length book, which serves equally well as both an on-the-ground travel guide and reference book for armchair travelers and scholars.
Wassily Kandinsky was already an internationally renowned artist and thinker by the time he joined the Bauhaus in 1922, having written Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) a decade prior and exhibited his work throughout Europe yet longer. While he claimed to have written the majority of Point and Line to Plane prior to 1914, it was not published until 1926, when it would become the ninth book in the Bauhausbücher series.
International Architecture, the initial title in the Bauhausbücher series, serves as a manifesto of sorts for editor Walter Gropius. Its general subject asserts the primacy of architecture over the other disciplines covered by the Bauhaus, and the specific structures he chooses are unerringly contemporary—some so new they are unbuilt, existing only as sketches or models.
Q Berlin 2022, “the metropolitan conference for the immediate present”, took place at the International Congress Center in Westend on September 15-16, featuring a hybrid assortment of talks, performances, and other events. The massive, brutalist ICC was built in 1979 and closed in 2014, though it is occasionally used for one-off events.
The Großer Heineberg is a 56-meter hill in Potsdam-Bornim (peak at 52.435010, 12.988588, map below). After WWII it was used as a dump for building materials, and while the vegetation has generally made a comeback the soil is still filled with pieces of brick, tile, and glass, with larger piles of rubble appearing frequently.
