Heritage—natural and cultural, material and immaterial—plays a key role in the development of sustainable cities and communities. Goal 11, target 4, of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasizes the relation between heritage and sustainability. The International LDE Heritage conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development Goals, which took place from 26 to 28 November 2019 at TU Delft in the Netherlands, examined the theories, methodologies, and practices of heritage and SDGs. It asked: How is heritage produced and defined? By whom and in what contexts? What are the conceptions of sustainability, and in what ways are these situational and contextual? How can theoretical findings on heritage and SDGs engage with heritage practice?@en

The Bauhaus had a pioneering influence on design worldwide which still endures today. Through education, experimentation and materialization, a revolution took place in the use of space, combining clarity, fluidity, functionality and beauty. The Weimar/Dessau school is remembered – from Gropius’ Weimar office to the Dessau masters’ houses, interiors and furniture – for its avant-garde approach to architecture, urbanism, and design for mass production and commercialization. While the objects it produced are its material legacy, the human body (or Oskar Schlemer’s “Human being”) was definitively at the centre of this experimental work. The unity between spirit and body spurred a quest into health, movement, hygiene, comfort, and rationality. The aim here is to demonstrate how this concept was achieved within a new use of space through innovative interior design. Materials and forms, as well as reinvigorated bodily awareness contributed to this transformation. The question is, how did Bauhaus’ “bodies” and “minds” challenge traditional ideas about daily life shaping the connection between physical and mental harmony. Using Gideon’s writings, namely “Mechanization takes command” and interior design case studies acquired in Japan, the goal of this paper is a threefold analysis: to explore the way the Bauhaus has inspired modern movement architecture up to the present day, to transform firstly space, and secondly, its use. Finally, the concept of the body: how Bauhaus ideas have migrated around the world to simultaneously promote a clear and hygienic aesthetic, connecting function and abstraction; to demonstrate, beyond das neue sachlichkeit, how one may realize the truth of Novalis’ metaphor: “the more poetic, the more truthful.”@en