Walter Gropius - the Bauhaus - Dessau, Germany
N 51° 50.330 E 012° 13.630
33U E 308978 N 5746748
Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.
Waymark Code: WM9XJD
Location: Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany
Date Posted: 10/11/2010
Views: 26
The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.
The city of Dessau provided money for the new school building on a development site close to the train station.
In his design, Walter Gropius refined architectonic ideas he first put into practice before WW I in the construction of the Fagus-Werke in Alfeld an der Leine. In Dessau as in Alfeld, the glass curtain wall suspended in front of the load-bearing framework defines the exterior of the workshop wing and openly shows the constructive elements. Gropius, rather than visually amplifying the corners of the cubic body of the building, allowed the glass surface to overlap the edges, thereby creating the impression of lightness.
Gropius consistently separated the parts of the Bauhaus building according to their functions and designed each differently. He thereby arranged the different wings asymmetrically – in relation to what is today the Bauhausstraße and the Gropiusallee respectively. In order to appreciate the overall design of the complex, the observer must therefore move around the whole building. There is no central viewpoint.
The glazed, three-storey workshop wing, the block for the vocational school (also three storeys high) with its unostentatious rows of windows, and the five-storey studio building with its conspicuous, projecting balconies are the main elements of the complex. A two-storey bridge which housed, e.g., the administration department and, until 1928, Gropius’s architectural practice, connects the workshop wing with the vocational school. A single-storey building with a hall, stage and refectory, the so-called Festive Area, connects the workshop wing to the studio building. The latter originally featured 28 studio flats for students and junior masters, each measuring 20 m². The ingenious design of the portals between the foyer and the hall and a folding partition between the stage and the refectory, along with the ceiling design and colour design, impart a grandiose spatial coalescence to the sequence of foyer-hall-stage-refectory, shaping the so-called Festive Area. The façade of the students’ dormitory is distinguished in the east by individual balconies and in the south by long balconies that continue around the corner of the building.
The entire complex is rendered and painted mainly in light tones, creating an attractive contrast to the window frames, which are dark. For the interior, the junior master of the mural workshop, Hinnerk Scheper, designed a detailed colour plan that, by differentiating between supporting and masking elements through the use of colour, aimed to accentuate the construction of the building.
Under pressure from the National Socialists, the "Hochschule für Gestaltung" (school of design) at the Bauhaus was closed in 1932. After suffering heavy bomb damage towards the end of the war, the building was provisionally repaired. Designated a protected monument in 1974, it was comprehensively restored for the first time in 1976. The Wissenschaftlich-kulturelle Zentrum Bauhaus Dessau (WKZ), which began to establish a Bauhaus collection and which organised events, introduced an institution that focused on the work of the Bauhaus Dessau into the building. The WKZ merged with two further education institutes in 1987 to form the Bauhaus Dessau, which in 1994 became the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. With its declaration as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1996, it was decided to carry out further extensive restoration, which was completed in 2006. Today, the Bauhaus is therefore once more a vital place for experimental design, research and teaching, similarly dedicated to the cultivation and communication of the Bauhaus legacy, and to work on contemporary urban issues.
Architect: Walter Gropius
Building Type: Other
Date Built: 1926
City building is located in: Dessau
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