Reinhard Zeiss is an urban designer, filmmaker and journalist from Vienna. As an urban designer, he works in Germany and Russia on the transformation of cities after the collapse of communist rule. He has made documentary films in Austria, Germany, Sweden, France and Italy. He has taught at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, and among his television documentaries is one on the Bauhaus in Dessau. Zeiss writes articles on architecture and urbanism for international journals.
Modernity celebrates a birthday: the eightieth anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus. This building was initially met with admiration and wonder, but was later forgotten. In the city of Dessau, few architectural works remain as survivors of the Bauhaus of Europe. The Bauhaus is a story of the search for the new: new forms, new content, and a new society. The Bauhaus is also a story of change and transformation: from Weimar to Dessau, from Dessau to Berlin, and then beyond Germany's borders, throughout the world.
The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar. At that time, the architect Walter Gropius merged the Grand Duke's School of Architecture with the Grand Duke's School of Applied Arts, thereby creating an educational institution of an entirely new and different kind, whose goal was to create harmony between art and industry. The Bauhaus, built upon the ruins of World War I, took upon itself the task of creating, through entirely new forms, tools and spaces for a humanitarian society with social justice for the future.
In the Bauhaus manifesto we read: “The ultimate goal of all creative activity is building! So let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class-dividing standards that erect walls between craftsmen and artists. Let us together build the building of the future, where everything will be in one form — architecture, sculpture and painting — that one day, from the hands of millions of craftsmen, will rise toward heaven as the crystal symbol of a single unified belief in the future.”
The Reconciliation of Art and Industry
The diversity of master craftsmen at the Bauhaus was correspondingly vast: artists of every type and various nationalities such as Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky — their names being just a handful from many. The differences manifested themselves in the so-called workshops: carpentry, stone and wood sculpture, mural painting, glass casting, metalwork, pottery, and weaving — all of which produced, within the space of a few years, a profusion of modern designs, especially for everyday objects, that have remained form-giving to this day. Alongside these, paintings, sculptures, and innovations in the art of stage design were also being created.
In 1923, the Weimar State Bauhaus held its first international exhibition under the title “Art and Technology, a New Unity.” That section of the exhibition called “International Architecture,” along with works and designs from outside the institution — including those of Le Corbusier or Bruno Taut — directed those who were aware toward new structures and the advancing modernism. In those days, the Bauhaus for its part was able to present, for the first time, a realistic building: the “House on the Hill,” the work of the young master Georg Muche.
It seems that this work was destined to be the sole architectural testament of the Bauhaus in Weimar. For only five years later, the right-wing nationalist parties in the Thuringian state parliament forcibly shut down this school. In this small city, the progressive visionaries of the new age, with their socialist and social claims, had been a foreign body throughout this period among a middle-class populace.
Industry as a New Partner
The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. The National Socialist mayor of the city had offered Walter Gropius land and capital for the construction of a new school building. Beyond that, public proposals had also been put forward. Above all, the factories of this growing industrial city in today's Saxony-Anhalt — especially the Junkers aircraft company — had declared their readiness to serve as partners in realising this ambitious goal. The aim was: the artistic penetration of everyday life through products made of affordable industrial materials and sensible mass production.
It was only a year later that the institution's building was inaugurated. Two thousand guests came from around the world and were astonished by this supremely modern and influential structure. Walter Gropius's primary aim in designing the building was functional spaces and an artistic form derived from appropriate function. Large glass surfaces — some spanning several stories — and white walls made the building appear, despite its multi-sectional composition and striking cubic forms, simple and almost ethereal. The minimal use of ancillary materials on the building's facade directs the mind toward larger forms with appropriate subdivisions, a sign of a beautiful, timeless edifice.
The Bauhaus building then, as now, is multi-functional. The three main sections of the building — the workshops; the technical teaching wing with its multiple classrooms, dining hall, festival hall and stage; and a two-story tower — are all interconnected. This last section housed the administrative offices and, earlier, Walter Gropius's architectural practice. This multi-sectional building does not lend itself to primary and secondary views and can only be comprehended in its full dimensions while in motion.
Inside the building, technical and functional details — such as the ingenious mechanism for opening the windows, new lighting fixtures, or furniture made from steel tubes (the work of Marcel Breuer) — impress the visitor. Additionally, the variety of colours, designed in the mural painting workshop and standing in contrast to the cliché of “white modernism,” or the contrast of various rooms that follow one another and the subsequent communicating spaces, all possess an allure. Even today, the Bauhaus building still serves as a manifesto of architectural modernism.
Modern or Fashionable?
The building that Walter Gropius erected became the impetus for the creation of a collection of innovative designs and their realisation in the city of Dessau. If the era of the Bauhaus's flourishing in Weimar was an era of construction, fundamental perspectives and the first social conflicts, we must say that the era of the Bauhaus's flourishing in Dessau was an era of maturation, realisation and, to some extent, becoming institutionalised. (The Bauhaus was now called by the subtitle “University of Form-Giving.”) Before long, talk arose of the so-called Bauhaus style, which was applied to anything that appeared modern in any way — and of course, anything in a world rushing toward new technologies was regarded by a large segment of the population as inhuman.
Ernst Kállai, who in 1930 was the editor of the Bauhaus journal, rejected this misidentification with the Bauhaus and its demotion to the level of a mere artistic style with his characteristic sarcasm, saying: “In any case, houses and housing estates are being built as collections of houses with smooth white walls, sets of slanting windows and flat roofs, and people accept them as the ‘Bauhaus style’ that they know. These days everyone knows that apartments with lots of glass and shiny metals are Bauhaus style. Tubular-steel furniture is Bauhaus style. Checkerboard wallpapers are Bauhaus style. No picture on the wall is Bauhaus style. A picture on the wall — whatever that means — is Bauhaus style. Small print and big bold letters are Bauhaus style. Indeed, the artistic method of building residential houses since 1925 is Bauhaus style.”
An example of the public's ambivalent attitude toward Bauhaus architecture is the Törten housing estate in the south of Dessau. Between 1926 and 1928, Walter Gropius, on commission from the city of Dessau, designed and executed a total of 314 one- and two-story housing units in four different building types. The aim of this extensive experimental estate was to reduce construction costs through new architectural organisation and technology. The housing problem for lower-income segments of society was to be solved in this manner. Standardisation, typology, prefabrication of building components, and modular assembly using cranes transformed Törten into a model of industrialised construction.
Of course, these days it is difficult to guess the original form of the estate's buildings. Only a few years after their construction, residents began renovating their homes. The most striking changes pertained to the street-facing facades. Gropius had fundamentally designed the windows of the houses as tall, ceiling-reaching openings to reduce energy loss through windows, and had provided spaces beneath the windows for placing furniture. Nevertheless, the residents found the tall, wide windows neither practical nor pleasing, and replaced them with conventional windows set at a lower height. These days, instead of the white facade with black and grey shadows, all manner of domestic architectural forms can be seen: woodwork, panel facades, white cement, and a variety of colours that could have been a source of pride for the Bauhaus mural painting workshop.
Enduring Qualities
On the other hand, the residents of Törten emphasise that the estate's buildings and their installations, even after 70 years, possess undeniable advantages. Walter Gropius managed to construct the apartments with overlapping spaces so that, with an average area of relatively modest size, they appear much larger than they actually are. The rooms were bright and, for their time, had a high standard. The best proof of this is that in some houses the same original central heating systems still exist. Moreover, each house in the estate had a usable garden that to some extent enabled residents to grow their own basic produce. Törten, in our time, with its green spaces and despite its relatively high building density, possesses a value rarely found in urban areas.
Another example of the work of Bauhaus architects in the south of Dessau was not built as a complex. Georg Muche and Richard Paulick, with their Steel House — an experimental structure built in 1926 and 1927 — proved the extent to which steel is suitable as a building material for industrial production and residential buildings. Although the Steel House was used as a residence for years, the experiment was never developed further.
More successful than that was the gallery-access building type. Five of these multi-storey residential apartment buildings were erected between 1928 and 1930 as part of the Törten estate expansion plan in Dessau. The Swiss architect Hannes Meyer's designs provided for 18 four-person apartments per building, each apartment having only 47 square metres of floor space. Nevertheless, the Bauhaus architects designed comfortable three-room apartments with kitchens, bathrooms and central heating. Each apartment also had a cellar and a small garden plot.
The gallery-access building type is especially suitable for cost-effective construction. Moreover, in this building style, considerable savings can be made in the design of staircases. Windows opening to the north side provide good ventilation for the south-facing, sunlit rooms. The gallery-style, curved corridors themselves facilitate contact among the building's residents. These apartments, despite their limited space, still have their admirers and thus represent a successful effort to create high construction quality in urban housing.
Diversity of Building Types
In Dessau, a small estate was designed with a separate house for the director and three pairs of houses for the most important Bauhaus masters. The first residents of these houses, in addition to Gropius himself, were László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, and also Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. These so-called Masters' Houses were very generously built. All apartments had a studio on the north side and terraces and balconies on the east and south. The interior design of the apartments served for many years as a standard for modern living.
The Bauhaus masters chose the colour schemes of their houses according to their own taste. During the 1994 restoration, the restorers discovered over forty colours on the walls, ceilings and floors of the Feininger house. Restoration work in both paired houses of Muche and Schlemmer, and Klee and Kandinsky, began the previous year. Restoration can serve as the most accurate indicator of the effort to preserve the original condition. The damage inflicted since the Nazi era and 40 years of East German rule cannot be overlooked. Half of László Moholy-Nagy's building and Walter Gropius's private house were irreparably lost due to World War II bombing.
The economic crisis twenty years later also gave rise to the need for new building types and an employment office in the industrial city of Dessau. Widespread unemployment made spaces for streamlined, frictionless administrative management essential. Walter Gropius designed his scheme in a fully functional manner, based on the flow of up to 2,000 visitors per day, and thus won the Dessau city competition. Five separate corridors and two exits divided the various sections of this brick building. The building, consisting of a separate single-story section for visitors and different entrances for various professional groups, provided separate entries for different categories. Regarding the exits, male and female job seekers were separated from each other. Although this aroused the suspicion of some, the reason was to prevent the disparity between women's lower unemployment benefits compared to their male colleagues from being apparent.
In order to make all paths equally long for job seekers and generally as short as possible, and for a building operating around the clock, the arrangement and length of the building's rooms corresponded to the flow of visitors. Each of the five entrances led to a single unit where consultations — and rarely, job placements through an intermediary — took place. From there, a corridor led to the central offices and finally to the payment counter at the most central point of this circular building, from where one could directly access the exits. The natural lighting of the main corridor and interior spaces was provided through a sawtooth ceiling with angled glass panels, creating a pleasant environment for people feeling depressed from their seemingly futile search for work.
The “newest” Bauhaus building in Dessau is located on the western edge of the city, directly beside the Elbe River. Here, the architect Karl Fieger strikingly demonstrated that modern architecture can also be construction in nature and with nature. The Kornhaus (Grain House), a recreational inn built in 1929 and 1930, owes much of its architectural impact to the charm of a sunny and beautiful panorama and in turn displays a wide view of the riverbank. The rooms and halls of this building — the dance hall, the large dining hall, the curved glass terrace — all face the exterior of the building and give guests the feeling of floating on the waters of the Elbe.
An Endless Conflict with Politics
Despite the execution of many architectural plans and the official recognition of artistic achievements at the Bauhaus, barely two years after the move from Weimar, Walter Gropius resigned from his position as director. From the very beginning, even in Dessau, political pressures had commenced that wore him down as much as the internal conflicts with certain masters over the future direction of the Bauhaus. It was during Gropius's directorship that several people, including László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer, left the institution.
Hannes Meyer, the Swiss architect, took over the directorship in 1927. He had come to Dessau a year earlier as the head of the architecture department. His slogan — “the needs of the people rather than luxury demands” — represented a new orientation and an openly social-political approach for the institution. Meyer, who was soon branded a communist, was dismissed by the municipality in 1930.
It was then that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe assumed the directorship. He transformed the Bauhaus structure into a completely apolitical school with a full orientation toward architecture. Given Germany's political extremism, this was the only possibility for continuing to run the Bauhaus. Of course, the advance of the National Socialists put an end to his efforts. In 1932, the majority of the Dessau city council decided to close the Bauhaus. Mies van der Rohe ran the institution briefly as a private institution in Berlin, but following a Gestapo inspection, the board of experts decided to dissolve the Bauhaus on June 19, 1933.
Most Bauhaus members emigrated to America, where — especially in Chicago — they assumed new responsibilities and were warmly welcomed in exchange for their personal achievements and the particular ideals of the Bauhaus. East Germany — whether in Weimar or Dessau — neglected the Bauhaus. It was not until the 1970s that people were able to carry out the first restoration of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, which had been severely damaged and abandoned in a defenceless state. Other buildings remained condemned to decay or subjected to restoration measures.
A New Beginning: 1989
The Bauhaus renaissance, 70 years after its founding, began with the political changes in East Germany. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation was revived and placed under preservation and care, and was made ready to present the Bauhaus heritage. The foundation's headquarters are in the same Bauhaus building, which is now continuously undergoing worthy restoration and repair. This institution regularly exhibits various works produced in the historic Bauhaus workshops, as well as the achievements of other representatives of modernism. The theatre hall and dining hall of the Bauhaus are once again finding their particular uses. The historic Technical School building is at the disposal of the Saxony-Anhalt State University, and in the basement of the main building, the Bauhaus Club — a café, restaurant, and even the workshops — have found new life. Scholars from various schools of thought, architects, urban designers, open-space designers and environmentalists are all once again invoking the Bauhaus tradition of shaping the human living environment in a manner appropriate to the times.
The newest plan is the establishment of an advanced college for architecture, whose motivation is the revival of the architectural tradition at the Bauhaus Dessau from the following year. In this way, Dessau joins the efforts of Weimar — the city of Goethe and Schiller, which alongside its classical roots also remembered its “modern past” and renamed its architecture school to “Bauhaus University Weimar” in 1994.
And What About the Future?
It appears that the continuity of the Bauhaus heritage is guaranteed for decades. In 1996, the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, the Masters' Houses, and the Bauhaus sites in Weimar (in addition to the House on the Hill and the former Bauhaus headquarters in Weimar, housed in two buildings designed by Henry van de Velde in the Art Nouveau style) were accepted by UNESCO into the World Cultural Heritage list. At the local and regional level, the value of the Bauhaus — not only from a historical and cultural perspective — has been recognised. While the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar and the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin are somewhat minor attractions within the rich culture and sights of these two cities, the numerous works from the Dessau era serve as bright spots in the otherwise uninspiring industrial city beside the Elbe River and the entire economically weak Saxony-Anhalt region.
Hopes of attracting tourists drive the necessary investments in the Bauhaus buildings. Legal frameworks have also been established, including: a statute designating the Törten estate as a protected monument zone, as well as financial sponsors — for example, the cost of the major portion of current restorations in both Masters' Houses has been covered by a large German construction company and an insurance company. The Bauhaus has meanwhile become an evocative symbol, but the best guarantee for the long-term preservation of the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau is their worthy utilisation as historical monuments while also being used in a manner appropriate to the times and forward-looking.
The Lyonel Feininger Masters' House, following its 1994 restoration, became the headquarters of the Kurt Weill Centre (the German composer). On the other hand, one of the buildings in the Törten estate in Dessau, which houses the Moses Mendelssohn Society, keeps alive the memory of another great son of this city. The old Employment Office was until recently used by the health insurance administration, and the city of Dessau is currently working toward appropriate public use of this Gropius-designed building (since the structure can accommodate more visitors). The Kornhaus on the bank of the Elbe remains a pleasant recreational venue, and the residential buildings — both the estate houses and the gallery-access buildings — are considered very attractive by their residents. In this way, the Bauhaus — long after being expelled from Dessau — is no longer considered a foreign body these days, but has become, in the eyes of most people, an important part of the city.
