VISION AND REALITY

Director of the "Bauhaus" Prof. Rolf Kuhn

Author & Director:

Juergen Ast | Maik Roth

Commissioning Editor:

Anette Reiß

Duration:

30'

Production:

astfilm productions | for MDR

Professor Doctor Rolf Kuhn - director of the so called "Bauhaus" in Dessau. We meet him in his office. When did one have the first point of contact to the Bauhaus? How does one become the director of the Bauhaus in the German Democratic Republic and how did one stay director after the Unification of Germany? Kuhn talks about his time from 1965 to 1970 as a student in Weimar, his work at the so called "Bauakademie" in Berlin, about trying to transport visions into the socialistic reality, about success and how to support the problems. 1977 he holds the professorship for City-Sociology in Weimar, another start, but later followed by resignation. Ten years later he is appointed to the director of the Bauhaus. "First of all, I do not exclude anything from life", says Kuhn.

The legendary Bauhaus stage, the workshop dreams, the famous staircase - Rolf Kuhn describes to us his new concept of the "three time partition": Workshop-Collection-Academy. "The aim of the new Bauhaus is the turnaround of the old" - but what is the specific meaning of such a sentence? Or the new orientation "Not from the house into the house, but from the house into the region." The specific vision of an "industrial garden", that is to what Rolf Kuhn is giving a lot of his attention, for a settled character like Kuhn a kind of unusual obsession. We travel with Kuhn through the park like landscape of Woerlitz, trough the industrial landscape of Vockerode, trough Dessau North into the settlements and the craters of the mines that remind us of the moon. His mind is occupied with a hundred ideas that he wants to discuss and realize with his assistants and students. The documentary-film is a interim balance sheet, a look back and into the future of a legendary institution and his director.