The Art of Joining

Konrad Wachsmann played an exceptional role among modern architects in helping to industrialize architecture and fostering the potential this contained for an architectural turn. Wachsmann’s universal wedge connector, invented in the shadow of World War II and applied in the General Panel System in collaboration with Walter Gropius in the US in 1941, was the point of departure for the Bauhaus Lab 2018. The postgraduate program investigated the historical context and the discourses of transatlantic post-war modernism that come together in the metal connector, while also reflecting on the contemporary relevance of the architectural discourse surrounding the ‘universal connector’.