Weimar: It is fitting that the question of how Europe should build, decorate and inhabit its future keeps returning to the small Thuringian city where the original Bauhaus was founded a century ago. This year the New European Bauhaus, the Commission’s attempt to revive that spirit for an age of climate anxiety, has thrown open its annual prizes and a fresh round of funding, inviting architects, designers and community groups to show that sustainability can be beautiful as well as virtuous.
The initiative is easy to underestimate. It commands nothing like the budgets of farm subsidies or defence procurement, and its language of aesthetics and belonging can sound soft beside the hard files that dominate the bloc’s agenda. Yet it carries an argument that its backers consider serious. If the green transition is to win public consent, they contend, it cannot be sold purely as sacrifice and regulation. People have to want the low-carbon home, the regenerated square, the repurposed factory, and wanting requires beauty as much as efficiency.
This year’s competition has been widened in both scope and reward. A clutch of winners will share substantial prizes, with a dedicated strand for those who can demonstrate the smartest use of scarce water, and new categories that reach beyond the Union’s borders to partners in Asia and Latin America. Alongside the prizes sits a far larger pot channelled through the bloc’s main research programme, hundreds of millions of euros over the next two years for projects that marry arts and culture to architecture and design, and that test how artificial intelligence and immersive technology might serve the creative sector rather than hollow it out.
The emphasis throughout is on the unglamorous business of reuse. Projects are urged to prioritise circularity, carbon neutrality, the preservation of cultural heritage, affordable housing and the revival of neighbourhoods that have been allowed to decay, whether on the edge of a shrinking rural town or in a tired urban district. It is an agenda that tries to bind together strands the Union usually treats separately, climate, culture, housing and regional renewal, on the theory that a well-designed place can advance all of them at once.
Critics, and there are some, question whether a prize fund and a research line can amount to anything more than tasteful branding. The sums involved are modest against the scale of Europe’s housing shortage and its renovation backlog, and there is a risk that the initiative produces a handful of photogenic pilot schemes while the broader building stock stays cold, leaky and unloved. A movement that prizes beauty must guard against becoming merely decorative.
Its defenders reply that ideas have to start somewhere, and that the early Bauhaus too began as a school and a manifesto before it reshaped how a continent thought about objects and space. Demonstration projects, they argue, change minds and set standards that later harden into the mainstream. A single inspiring conversion of a derelict mill can do more to shift public expectations than a thousand pages of building regulation.
Whether the modern incarnation earns the comparison to its illustrious namesake remains to be seen. For now, in the city where it all began, the invitation is open, and Europe’s designers are being asked to prove that greener living can also be a pleasure.
