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.
FOUNDED IN BERLIN in 2017, Rixdorf Editions is an independent press dedicated to publishing neglected German texts of the late 19th and early 20th century in new English translations. In focusing on previously untranslated works of the pre-Weimar “Wilhelmine” era, the press sheds light on a literary era that is often overlooked, despite having produced writing as startlingly creative and groundbreaking – if not more so – than the more famous movements that would follow.
THOUGH THERE ARE dozens of locations in greater Potsdam with “Berg” (literally “mountain”, though often applied to much more modest hills) in their names, the region is overwhelmingly rural, flat, and agrarian. Nonetheless, even among the sprawling corn and alfalfa fields and winding highways of Potsdam Nord, occasional clusters of hills reach high enough altitudes to be notable.
