Architects and designers from leading firms, as well as influencers and experts, will examine the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary design thinking and practice, exploring issues such as research, technology and health.
Through deep analysis, critical perspective, and detailed reporting, Metropolis members will give you the tools you’ll need in the coming year.
In 2019, two museums called the Bauhaus appeared in German cultural circles. To take advantage of the design school’s centenary, the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar was the first to emerge from its gates, opening in early April. A few clicks later, the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau followed suit in early September. A third project, the delayed expansion of Walter Gropius’s 1979 Bauhaus Gestaltung Archive/Museum in Berlin, has not kept pace and was expected to be open for several more years.
Currently in Berlin, Captain Gropius’s keel has been shipwrecked in a muddy ditch and his program has been moved to a temporary annex. The building, built in 1976, the same year that the GDR rebuilt the Dessau campus in Kapitan opened in 1979, has never been particularly popular despite the dramatic increase in foot traffic since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was apparently the result of a compromise: Gropius’ original plan in 1964 for a sloping site in Darmstadt, a small town near Frankfurt, was thwarted by local politicians. It wasn’t until the following decade, after Gropius’ death, that the project found a place in what was then West Berlin. However, this disruption disrupted the original plan and required extensive modifications (especially the conversion of the building to a level area) by Gropius’ assistant Alex Cianovich.
Any liveliness from the first draft was methodically killed in the pale final version. In the words of the critic Sibylla Moholy-Nagy, it is modular, without faith in its logic and subtractive, “without a fiery desire for new potential.” He used every opportunity to confront Gropius in his old statesman days. The surface, which, contrary to the school’s reputation, was a source of concern for craftsmanship among Bauhaus architects, was matte. The famous pitched roof, as well as the lively winding ramp added by Cvijanovic, aim for more height but fail. It was not the Bauhaus.
The case of the Bauhaus Archives is instructive because it highlights the problem of building a “brand”, especially a traditional brand like the Bauhaus. Magic simply cannot be restored, just as tragedy becomes farce and farce becomes memetic nihilism. While every city in the world is churning out “modern” buildings, they have more in common with the most famous design schools of the 20th century than with the virality of IKEA and Alucobond.
However, the genius of the Bauhaus lay in the flammable political situation that forced it into existence. Out of the lava of the world wars, a new spirit arose, which Gropius expressed in his 1919 manifesto at the founding of the school in Weimar. “Crystallization” is the key term, as is his memorable admonition: “Art must finally find its crystalline expression in a great work of art. This great work of art, this future cathedral, Bring an abundance of light into the smallest objects of everyday life. life.”
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the most copied image of the early Weimar period of the Bauhaus was a woodcut by Lionel Feininger depicting a prismatic “socialist cathedral”. This is the socialism of William Morris, earthly and fraternal, yielding to sensuous feeling and the essence of species before instrumental reason. Art, that is, craft, will be a precaution against the horrors of mechanized warfare to which the bourgeoisie at home and abroad will resort.
What is needed in the face of such a confrontation is emotion and humanity, and where better to take this position than in Weimar, the nerve center of the German Enlightenment, the birthplace of Goethe and Schiller? But soon the expressionist Esperanto that hovered in the studios of the Bauhaus turned into yet another designer theism, more angular and fragmented, partly based on the work of Theo van Doesburg’s De Stijlist.
Heike Hanada, the architect who designed the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, had little purchasing power for either influence. A squat concrete cube, it expresses some of the anxiety hidden in expressionism, but denies its saving grace. Appropriate given the importance of the Weimar policy of extermination backed by the Nazi machine, as well as the location’s proximity to the Gauforum (the administrative building where the policy was developed) and the Buchenwald concentration camp (where the policy was carried out). The volume of the museum has only a few windows, which gives it a strong sense of solidity. The strategy seems to be an internalized negative initiation if it were not for the airy interior, which nevertheless suffers from an overemphasis on a central, very narrow staircase.
For all those compressed and heavy bearings, this is not a “silo” as some reviewers claim. Architectural criticism has always had a disturbing convention with comparisons. In this case, the temptation is understandable—so close to the Gauforum and adjacent court that once held the honorary title of “Adolf Hitlerplatz”—and, in any case, points to version A of Derwin’s law: any discussion of the Bauhaus will lead to Nazism.
The school was first kicked out of Weimar when irate provincial authorities withdrew funding. He moved to Dessau and the school spent its golden years (1926) on the Gropius campus hatching. Gropius passed the baton to the grinning communist (and architecturally superior) Hannes Meyer. The school has expanded, and at the same time, students have become more fully engaged with the world outside of their studios. This became a problem, Meyer was forced to leave and Mies van der Rohe stepped into the gap. He abandoned the curriculum and shifted his focus from workers’ housing, as well as advertising, painting, sculpture, and theater, to Plato’s flat-glass villa. Student exploration of industrial and historical mysteries is redirected to finger-to-lip study of architectural form. But that’s okay, because brown shirts are popping up here, and some even seep into the Bauhausler. They called the school an “aquarium” and sent it to Berlin, where it eventually succumbed to the Kulturkampf threat.
The Bauhaus was one of the first victims of fascism, which led to the dispersal of its leaders across borders and hemispheres. (Moholy-Nagy again: “In 1933 Hitler shook the tree and America reaped the fruits of German genius.”) By the end of the century, Gropius, Breuer and others were welcome to the heart of America’s intellectual world. . And “feel” – the stupid nickname given to him by a new friend – began to proactively erase the records. The Weimar period was completely killed, and the socialist current of the school was redirected. What remains is his Bauhaus in Dessau, an institution far too modern for the Old World.
The Bauhaus was the linchpin of the CIA’s soft power strategy to undermine the post-World War II Soviet Union’s high profile. Dessau, the university campus and the city were under Soviet control, but the real Bauhaus, like democracy, lived in the first world. As scholars such as Kathleen James-Chakraborty have shown, the various currents of modernity that existed before, at the same time and even after the German Bauhaus – Neues Bauen, Expressionism, Weimar Lichtreklame – were officially incorporated into the Bauhaus, the brand will be imported all over the world. . NATO group.
But in the architecture of the echt Bauhaus of his native country, the two hands are the most important. In addition to school campuses, there are also textbook buildings, such as Gropius’s master’s villa for the Bauhaus masters (indeterminate, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy), and non-educational, non-stucco works, namely the Gropius Employment Office (1929) and Hannes Meyer. A deceptively simple house with a balcony (1930). In Weimar, Haus am Horn in 1923 was the first attempt at the genre. Even further from Central Germany was Meyer’s trade union school ADGB at Bernau, near Berlin, in 1930. Like the Dessau campus, it is full of ideas – and very useful ones – but indifferent to Gropius’ Sachlichkeit signal.
Even after a century, buildings still crack due to their sheer force of example. Of course, it is possible not to have the Lutheran purity, which the Bauhauslers have already subverted in their everyday social relations. Or a frivolous conceptual afflatus (“new unity”), or a technocratic anthem (art and technology, technology and art, amen).
Well, thanks to Addendum Architects, the studio behind the Bauhaus Museum Dessau in Barcelona, Spain. It eliminates the most obnoxious features of the Dessau Gang while retaining the hard lines and whimsical typography. It cannot be said that the building is outstanding. The diagram is very simple, a classic connection between virtual and real: an exhibition hall with a continuous clear span overhangs a mixed design hall with a continuous clear span. The top half is colored black to hide the contents, while the bottom half leaves the translucent envelope intact.
So humble so far. But given the building’s prominent location in a large downtown park, the glass windows aren’t as transparent as they should be. The architects intended to dematerialize the facade (in the spirit of the Bauhaus), so that both inside and outside were blurred, but beyond that, the presence of the museum in other public places seemed intrusive.
Meanwhile, the expansion of the museum in Berlin is the most elegant of the new works. Most of the project will be hidden underground, with a five-story tower being the only visible superstructure on the plan. It has thin, parametric regular columns on the outside, leaving the inside floor (for the museum café and shop) completely open. Staab Architekten was taken over by the commission in 2015 and it was wise to keep some distance between the existing building and the own, in order to better eliminate any direct influence.
Ironically, much of the Bauhaus’ claim to history has to do with the architectural work that is to blame. With the exception of the Meyer buildings and the Dessau campus, “Bauhaus architecture” is a bit misleading. Other activities at the school, from weaving to wallpaper design, from painting to advertising, were innovative and still capture our imagination. (In fact, the Bauhaus did not have an architectural plan for most of its existence.)
What will keep students awake at night if the Bauhaus is restructured in 2019? This is the question posed by the new book The Future of the Bauhaus (MIT Press), and among the many varied and timely answers, architecture, that is, architecture, is nowhere to be found. But you can’t launch mass tourism campaigns just for the sake of frozen ideas – risky new intellectual property.
Potential travelers are also not allowed to walk inside the Albers Tapestry. You cannot dwell in a Klee painting or press your body against the outline of Brandt’s teapot. But you can get on a plane, fly to Berlin, take a train to Dessau, catch a taxi to Gropiusallee 38, walk through those (more than red) red doors, pose for photos on the stairs, in the gift shop, in mourning. in the dining room is your lost youth. You can even stay overnight.
You might also like Far from the Temple of Reason, the Bauhaus is a perverted cauldron.
Subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest updates, exclusive content and subscription offers straight to your inbox!
Post time: Sep-23-2022