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Lecture Prof. Dr. Sylvia Claus

Fast facts

Organizer
Architecture
Date & Time
06/01/202618.00o'clock–19.00o'clock

Information

As part of the seminar "MATERIAL, OBJECT & SPACE" at the Department of Architectural History, Theory and Heritage Conservation, which takes place in cooperation with the seminar "Schools of Arts and Crafts" by Prof. Christiane Salge (TU Darmstadt), the art historian Prof. Dr. Sylvia Claus (btu Cottbus) will give a lecture on June 1, 2026, at 6 p.m. on the Werkschule für gestaltende Arbeit in Szczecin in the field of tension between the Kunstgewerbereform and the Werkbund.

Prof. Dr. Sylvia Claus

The model case of Szczecin: The School of Design between the Arts and Crafts Reform and the Werkbund

First established during the Weimar Republic, the Szczecin School of Design is a relatively young establishment among arts and crafts schools. Located on the edge of what was then the German Reich, in what is now Szczecin, the school advanced within a few years to become a widely respected training center, which was soon awarded its own new building. The lecture shows how the initiator of the Werkschule, Walter Riezler, together with the director Gregor Rosenbauer, who was appointed under his influence, succeeded in shaping the school into a model institution of the Deutscher Werkbund in its heyday and propagating it as such. The intellectual biography of the Szczecin Werkschule is an example of how closely the Werkbund and the arts and crafts reform movement still belonged together in the Weimar Republic and how strongly avant-garde tendencies often attributed solely to the Bauhaus generally shaped the intellectual exchange between the center and the periphery.

Dr. phil. Sylvia Claus is Professor of Art History at the Institute for Building and Art History at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg and a member of the DFG network "The German Schools of Arts and Crafts: Artistic and Craft Training Institutions in the Long 19th Century"