From Bauhaus to Mecca

From Bauhaus to Mecca focuses on the life’s work of Dr Mahmoud Bodo Rasch (1943). His father Bodo Sr and his uncle Heinz Rasch were both Bauhaus architects, while his mother was the celebrated painter and illustrator Lili Rasch-Naegele. Rasch himself trained as an architect and joined the firm of Frei Otto (1925–2015), the celebrated designer of lightweight structures. Otto and Rasch experimented with model-making in a variety of ways, seeking inspiration in nature for forms they could apply to architecture. They used soap-film to help design immense, lightweight roof structures that won them international fame.

In 1974, while working as a guest lecturer in the United States, Rasch took part in an urban planning competition for an immense Tent City in Mina, Saudi Arabia. He converted to Islam and co-founded The Hajj Research Center with his friend Sami Angawi. The HRC approached the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, from an urban design perspective, in which Rasch attempted to apply the lightweight construction ideas he had gained while working with Frei Otto.

The Hajj is one of Islam’s five pillars of faith. Some two million pilgrims take part in it every year. Rasch attracted worldwide attention with the immense, self-deploying umbrellas he created for the city of Medina. They shield pilgrims from the hot sun – one of the main causes, together with crushes, of death at the Hajj. What sets Rasch’s work apart is the way he creates functional designs for spiritual practice. He was one of the first to analyse the Hajj as a design brief. This way of viewing the pilgrimage helps visitors understand the many down-to-earth considerations and decisions entailed by a religious project.

Remarkably, Rasch is not very well known in Europe. Design Museum Den Bosch is eager to change this, as his work provides an immense opportunity to explore the contemporary world of design, architecture and belief. You will discover at the exhibition how a socio-religious phenomenon on the scale of the Hajj is still strongly linked to design. Because design – just like deeply-held religious and philosophical beliefs – plays a fundamental part in people’s lives, to which it literally gives shape. The exhibition’s focus on Rasch’s work highlights the coming together of several different worlds: his family’s Bauhaus connections, the nature-inspired lightweight structures of his mentor Frei Otto and Islamic architecture and design. All the elements, in short, that are inextricably linked to his design and his working methods.