Will the ‘New Bauhaus’ of Green Architecture Look Like This?

Will the ‘New Bauhaus’ of Green Architecture Look Like This?

It's not often that the European Commission, a sprawling bureaucracy housed in an ugly building, triggers my aesthetic imagination. But it happened last year, when President Ursula von der Leyen declared that she wanted to bring into life a "new European Bauhaus.“

What, I began wondering, might this look like? I think I've now had a first glimpse.

Von der Leyen meant the phrase as a catchy shorthand for a wholesale cultural change to accompany her biggest goal: making the European Union climate neutral by 2050. This undertaking will require far more than reforming our energy industry. It also means reimagining our buildings and entire cities.

Inevitably, such changes will become associated with their own aesthetic. So it was with all other movements in history. And among the most famous “” hence von der Leyen's reference to it “” was the original Bauhaus, which was founded in Weimar in 1919 and thrived for 14 years until the Nazis shut it down.

The Bauhaus was an interdisciplinary design school that attracted architects and artists, craftspeople and carpenters, typographers and ceramists. Guided by the principles that form should follow function and that nothing should be wasted, they designed new stuff: chairs, lamps, type fonts, buildings, you