For years now, I have been speaking three languages on a daily basis — Greek, German, and English. But language is never only words. It carries cultural codes with their own logic and assumptions about what is obvious, what is important, and what does not need to be said — each one a distinct history and way of being in the world.

Learning to move between them — literally and metaphorically — has taught me to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to resist easy conclusions, and to find common ground across difference without erasing it.

The Bauhaus understood this instinctively. It was never just a school. It was a community drawn from across Europe and beyond, working across art, craft, and architecture — aiming for a new way of living, and therefore a new society, at a time of profound political instability. When it was forced to close in 1933, its members scattered across the globe, carrying its ideas with them and planting them in new contexts.

The Bauhaus did not produce a single language but rather a way of thinking across borders, cultures and disciplines.

Yet for decades, his work remained largely unknown outside a small circle of specialists. No major exhibition. No accessible publication. A story waiting to be told.

Researching his life and writings for my doctoral thesis, I realized that the gap was not only about Despotopoulos. It was about something larger: the distance between what scholars know and what the broader public can access.

The exhibition From Building to Community: Ioannis Despotopoulos and the Bauhaus was an attempt to close that gap — to take what I had found in the archive and make it something people could experience, understand, and connect to their own lives. It is on permanent display at the Athens Conservatoire, a building Despotopoulos designed himself as a space of educational community.

Today, this commitment has become the centre of my work — what I call architectural mediation. Through guided tours at the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, through writings, talks, digital presence and public programmes. The form changes. The question remains the same: how do we make the knowledge that matters reach the people it belongs to?