An orange paper sign reads “yummy food this way -->> “ pointing to a Weimar-staircase-shaped-grill. The disproportionate ceramic architecture model of the Bauhaus burns along with veggie sausages, corn and zucchinis while children arrange vegetables on wooden sticks, laughing and talking in German. Excited for the veggie hot dogs, the children come close to the grill sharing their thoughts: “this is the best meal in the world”, “ smells like my home in bulgaria” and “what is this building?” It’s the staircase for the Bauhaus school of arts and architecture, I explained. 

I chose this particular building because it’s one of the icons of the modernist movement in Architecture. Since the 1920s, Modernism has spread across the globe, acting as a form of recolonization. The rise of political and artistic institutions concretized in the modernist projects have been international actors and symbols of memory erasure, white violence and land takeover. In historical photographs of modernist architecture, people are usually not visible. If they were presented, they served as blurry scale figures, like ghosts. And we all know ghosts don’t eat. I started to imagine AI-generated photographs showing people living and barbecuing at the terrace of Le Corbusier’s villa Savoye in France. In Munich, we are grilling hot-dogs at a park within a housing project. Not far from the BMW tower and museum. Together, we sculpted a ceramic model of the tower as a vase. 

My main approach to the Project was asking questions about how to talk to kids of architecture and urbanism? What are architecture movements standing for in history? How to get them thinking about public politics and common space? And how this could be connected to food-politics as well as immigration policies? If someone asks me, have you ever seen a building burn? I will reply with have you ever seen a modernist building feeding veggie hot-dogs to children? Fire is non-binary: It can be frightening. It also offers space for community, to connect, to warm, to cook, to craft. It can create a moment to share knowledge, to laugh, play and eat, while talking about history and listening to stories. Children can teach us how. 

text for the FahrenderRaum catalogue 

by juca fiis