I generally disregard the narrative attached to design - went to arch school so am entirely jaded about that aspect of design. So I love Sant'Elia but have a few issues with the Manifesto; love some Italian Fascist buildings (they're gorgeous) but am not a fan of Duce; same goes for Bauhaus: quite a few gems came out of Bauhaus, but as you noted I did not hide my disdain for that 'wing' of the orthodox binary political spectrum.
Two dyads that have been adopted fairly generally as central to design for modern humanity are: individual vs. collective, and, man and nature.
The architects that I admire started from the I|C paradigm and ended up in M|N.
The former has an unfortunate tendency to be subsumed by a political reading of the question: what is the order and nature of the relationship between the individual and the collective. This dyad has proved to be a disaster, for example, in psuedo (poser) Marxist/Socialist approaches to mass housing, and is in no small part responsible for the distasteful Post-Modernism that followed in reaction.
So design research in Man | Nature dyad. That is my personal direction and what I think (obviously :) is the appropriate venue of further efforts. (Why: The question of unit-collective is in fact embedded in that dyad. So is the quite topically urgent question of Man | Machine.)