Dear all, particularly all those who have contributed to this post

Shall I then broadly conclude, as a curious and somehow interested outsider:

- first, that all along from the Bauhaus, the New-Bauhaus, and Ulm up to
now, there has been and still is an 'underground' movement in the West,
contesting the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois ideology and practice initiated in the
16th-17th centuries, spreading a material culture that exclusively focuses
on 'style', i.e. 'look' (on visual sense and aesthetics), on mechanical
functioning, and on commercial market value; in oblivion of the many other
advantages that humans could draw from production and interaction with
artifacts?

- second, that, thus far, the main weakness of the above supposedly
contesting movement is that it has lacked coalescence in a long standing
and established institution of some sort, with an ideology and practice
squarely opposing and broadening the narrow and limited, yet still
currently dominant aesthetics, engineering, and mercantile considerations
above?

- third, as Klaus revealed to us, it is mainly students in the three above
cited and failed institutions, who have always been, and still are à
l'avant-garde, in different ways contesting blind reproduction and
expansion, through theirinstitutional professors, of the above Anglo-Saxon
bourgeois ideology and practice?

- fourth, following the closure of Ulm for reasons so revealingly reported
by Klaus, does anyone envisage any perspective that, soon, forced by the
actual global world situation that is totally different from the rather
confined 17th-20th century Europe and North America, the present or near
future generations will, somehow, somewhere, practically complement -
helped in that by a host of continually invited and evolving Bauhaus/Ulm
inspired professors in different academic domains and from other cultures
of the now globalized world? -  the obviously limited only three lenses
world vision of artifacts (just as functional, beautiful, and monetary
market goods) of the West dominated and now globally world dominating era?

In other words, following the edifying exchange in this post, can we
finally afford to dream of a possible, necessary, and hopefully more
successful institution somewhere in the world, picking up and carrying
further on the Bauhus/Ulm torch, and enlighten the many, much more
advantageous attributes of artifacts? Another positive outcome would thus
be that the exercise we have gone through and efforts and time deployed on
this post wouldn't have been just for idle intellectual curiosity and mere
fun!

Bonne chance!

François
From my sunny flower fields in Nothern Rwanda


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