Bauhaus Foundation Course instructional booklet

Here’s a PDF of my Bauhaus Foundation course handout from 2017; it’s been sitting here on my computer for months now and it seems high time to share it. This is all based on my research into the preliminary course / foundation course work of Josef Albers, and the folding exercises he taught his students at both the Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC.

It’s a few simple models, including the Hypar (as shown above), a herringbone corrugation pattern, a basic Floderer-esque crumpling piece, and a pleated wave (from Goran Konjevod). We touched on more work during our course but these needed the most instruction, so they were diagrammed.

All that being said, I vastly prefer to walk students through folding, crumpling, and cutting things by hand without instructional sheets – I don’t want them to just follow a handout and duplicate what they see. I want them to experience the process and think about it so they may find new ways of doing it in their own style. They are learning exercises, after all!

There’s two versions to download: one is in A5 booklet format, the other the same content but as separate pages. I’d recommend the booklet PDF for printing, and the other for digital viewing.