Scenes from the Most Beautiful Campus in Africa
A Film about the Ife Campus

Published in April of 1919, a tract for his new school penned by Walter Gropius expresses the basic tenets of this new school and its unique goal of bringing architects, artisans and artists together to create a new working and training community united by the primacy of architecture and a return to notions of craftsmanship as its guiding ethos. Gropius stressed the vigor of this appeal by dubbing the pamphlet a “manifesto” a decision reminiscent of avant-garde art groups such as the Dadaists and Futurists; making the Bauhaus manifesto the first (but not last) architectural manifesto.

In this recorded interview, Vicuña describes how after she first learned about quipu, she immediately integrated the system into her life. Quipu, the Spanish transliteration of the word for “knot” in Cusco Quechua, is a system of colored, spun and plied or waxed threads or strings made from cotton or camelid fiber. They were used by the Inca people for a variety of administrative purposes, mainly record-keeping, and also for other ends that have now been lost to history. 

The history of the Stalinist critique of the Bauhaus and Hannes Meyer has two chapters. The first chapter spans the time from 1929 to the Architects’ Congress in the Soviet Union in 1937; the second consists in the condemnation of the Bauhaus in the GDR that took place on the trip by East German architects to Moscow in spring of 1950. This text tells the story of the first chapter.