New European Bauhaus ACE Initiative for Young Architects
Introduction by Dr. Selma Harrington (ACE)
Echoing the title of the ambitious volume East West Central. Re-building Europe, instigated by the Executive Board Members of the Architects Council of Europe, a grouping of academics and professionals has put together an open- source pilot program exploring the meaning and potential of the EU COM’s New European Bauhaus initiative to engage the creative professionals in Europe’s East.
The program consists of a series of online lectures and workshops with the targeted audiences from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ireland. The invited speakers, practicing architects, lecturers, researchers, as well as other cultural professionals will ponder on the application of the New European Bauhaus principles underlined by the slogan “Beautiful, Sustainable, Together.” The focus is on developing a better understanding of the formation, qualification and practice of architecture and related fields of urbanism, planning, landscape architecture, interior architecture, spatial arts, crafts and other disciplines in built environment faced with the challenges of the European Green transformation envisaged as a cultural movement.
Led by the Steering group of architects and academics, the series of lectures and workshops are designed as an interactive process and builds up on the experiences of the co-creation process of the New European Bauhaus initiated in 2024. This pilot process will take place over three academic semesters in blocks titled NEBINAR Pearl, Shell and Bite, culminating with an exhibition in Wroclaw in 2024, accompanied by review and report. While the NEBINAR Pearl examines the seeds of the NEB initiative and the value tools like the NEB Compass and the DAVOS Baukultur Quality system, the NEBINAR Shell will identify the good practice cases and their theoretical and contextual grounding, and the NEBINAR Bite will chart the hot-spots, locations, problems and future projects.
It is envisaged that the program can be replicated in other cities of the wider region, in partnership with universities, local authorities and professional associations, with the ambition to create a continual professional development template at a graduate and post- graduate level.