Title: The Itinerant Red Bauhaus, or the Third Emigration
Description: This dissertation, The Itinerant Red Bauhaus, or the Third Emigration, addresses a movement of architects from Europe to the Soviet Union during the interwar period. These architects (who include Hannes Meyer and Ernst May and their respective brigades) mostly relocated before the war, and many returned to Europe after the war. This larger frame helps to situate the specific group of architecture students from the German Bauhaus who followed Meyer to the Soviet Union in 1930 after he was expelled from the directorship of the Bauhaus: the Red Bauhaus Brigade. Driven by collectivist ideology, Meyer and his short-lived brigade staged an itinerant extension of the interrupted ‘second’ Bauhaus. Part of the research focuses on Meyer’s pedagogical project in order to unfold the education received by the students and understand the evolution of their architectural ideas after they moved to the Soviet Union. The dissertation concludes in the postwar period in the countries where the Brigade members Tibor Weiner, Konrad Püschel, Philipp Tolziner, and René Mensch were independently active as designers, city planners, teachers, polemicists, and political activists.

Their distinct professional approaches can be read against their Bauhaus origins and Soviet experience, but are not reducible to them. Shifting the focus from Meyer to his students allows the foregrounding of the point of view of these secondary characters, activating a new reading of the period studied and an in-depth evaluation of an overlooked Bauhaus legacy.