Paul Klee: Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925–) [DE, EN, GR, RU]

“Paul Klee occupies a unique position among the creators of modern art. Although he shed all ties with conventional presentation, he developed a closer and deeper relationship to reality than did most painters of his time. Without any attempt at imitation or idealization, he recorded proportion, motion, and depth in space as the fundamental attributes of the visual world.

Klee collected his observations in his Pedagogical Sketchbook intended as the basis for the course in design theory at the famous Bauhaus art school in Germany. From the simple phenomenon of interweaving lines, his work leads to the comprehension of defined planes-of structure, dimension, equilibrium, and motion. But he employs no abstract formulas. The student remains in the familiar world-a world that acquires new significance through the straight forward approach of Klee’s simple, lucid drawings and his precise captions. Chessboard, bone, muscle, heart, a water wheel, a plant, railroad ties, a tightrope walker-these serve as examples for the forty-three design lessons.

Pedagogical Sketchbook is a vital contribution toward a more human, more universal goal in design education the work of a visionary painter who dedicated himself to the practical task of making people see.” (from the Back cover)

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925
Volume 2 of Bauhausbücher series
50 pages

English edition
Introduction and Translation by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy
Publisher Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1953
The original layout by L. Moholy-Nagy has been retained
65 pages

Wikipedia

Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (German, 33 MB, via Bibliothèque Kandinsky, added on 2014-8-17, updated on 2022-4-13)
Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (German, PDF, JPG, in Heidelberg U Library, added on 2019-7-7)
Pedagogical Sketchbook (English, 1953 edition, no OCR)
Pedagogical Sketchbook (English, 1960 edition, 7th printing from 1972)
Παιδαγωγικό Σημειωματάριο (Greek, trans. Β. Λαγοπούλου, 1976)
Pedagogikheskie eskizy (Russian, trans. N. Druzhkovoy, 2005, added on 2014-3-6)

See also other titles in the Bauhaus Books series, as well as Klee’s class notes in manuscript and an edited version of his Notebooks.

A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper, 2(1): Researching BWPWAP (2013)

“In referring to the cancellation of Pluto’s planetary status in 2006, BWPWAP (Back When Pluto Was a Planet) – the 2013 edition of the transmediale festival – interrogates techno-cultural processes of displacement and invention, and asks for artistic and speculative responses to new cultural imaginaries. In light of this, the conference and workshop Researching BWPWAP took place in November 2012 in Lüneburg, Germany, organised jointly by Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Aarhus University and the reSource transmedial culture/transmediale. The call for participation focused on Ph.D. researchers and other participants to speculate on BWPWAP as a pretext for presenting their research and even to further reflect on its circulation as a meme.

This newspaper presents some outcomes of this process, and like the conference and workshop, can be interpreted in the context of a research culture that has been significantly destabilized by network culture and digital media. If the planet Pluto didn’t exactly fall prey to an epistemological break or a scientific revolution, but rather to a mundane administrative procedure – a redefinition of what constitutes a planet – then what does this say about contemporary research culture? Certainly, much research culture has shared Pluto’s fate: conferences reduced to networking events to foster cultural capital, and scholarly communications reduced to impact factors measured by grant givers. In other words, research is not just about measuring the performativity of a single researcher (the peer-reviewed journal system), but also the processes of questioning, investigating, speculating, and sharing between peers in a broader sense.” (from the Editorial)

Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox
Publisher Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, in collaboration with reSource transmedial culture Berlin/transmediale, Berlin, February 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license
ISBN 8791810256
ISSN 2245-7593

Project page
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-9-20)

Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy journal, No. 2: Materialism, No. 3: Realism (2011-2012)

“This issue arose out of a series of reflections on the contemporary meaning of realism in the representational strategies of the design disciplines. Realism, in this context, departs from the nineteenth century preoccupation with presenting environments and subjects typically excluded from pictorial representation. Today, while the ‘realistic’ is favoured and celebrated in student and professional renderings, it seems closer to a contemporary naturalism, at times verging on mannerism: for instance, impossibly lit buildings at dusk, exaggerated perspectives which amplify the speed toward a vanishing point, or, at its most intense, landscapes populated by ghostly figures simultaneously performing every possible cliché of ‘leisure’. While the ‘realistic’ is a recurring theme within both design education and professions, there seems to be a lack of realism. This issue attempts to set up a conversation between both terms by bringing together a series of reflections and practices hinged on both contemporary and historical usages of realism, situating conflict­ng accounts of its meaning side by side.” (from the Editorial Note)

Issue 3: Realism
Summer 2012
Issue Editors: Adrian Blackwell, Adam Bobbette
42 pages

PDF

“Materialism continues the commitment of our first two issues on Property and Service to examine foundational yet overlooked concepts in architecture and landscape architecture. In our estimation, these disciplines are haunted by materialism. We see its specular presence invoked in design research’s emphasis on large-scale flows and sites of material production, in the renewed focus on ‘performance’ and the rehabilitation of functionalism, in the centrality of ‘material’ as an expressive layer of tectonics, and through the import of non-human actors into discussions about spatial design. Each of the above invokes matter as its base.” (from the Editorial Note)

Issue 2: Materialism
Winter 2011
Issue Editors: Adam Bobbette, Jane Hutton
Publisher Scapegoat Publications, Toronto
40 pages

PDF

authors
Previous two issues