On 26th December 1924 the declaration of the closing of the Weimar Bauhaus was announced effective from 31st March 1925. On the 1st April 1925 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and began a new era both geographically and culturally.
In 1924 Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer had had the
opportunity to work on a design for an international Academy of Philosophy in
Erlangen. They wanted to unite teaching and living in one set of buildings.
This is an idea that Gropius carried over to the Bauhaus building and the two
designs have a vague similarity.
Although you can’t view the whole of the Dessau Bauhaus
building from any one viewpoint, except the air. The composition as viewed from
the air was important to Gropius as he said, ‘Air traffic routes place a new
demand on the builders of houses and cities: to deliberately shape the
appearance of the building as seen from the air.’ He avoids symmetry and
reinforces a concrete skeleton with brick masonry and large areas of glass,
particularly in the cantilevered glass wall of the workshop wing. This was
connected to the technical school wing by “the bridge” on columns. Gropius
aimed for ‘proper utilisation of the exposure to the sun; short time-saving
communicating passages, clear separation of the individual departments of the
organism.’ The students’ studio apartments were connected to the workshop by a
single-storey section which housed the stage, flanked by the auditorium and the
canteen. Partitions could be opened on both sides, making both the auditorium
and the canteen into spectator arenas and integrating the sequence of
canteen-stage-auditorium-vestibule into a ‘large festival area’. This flexibility
in the arrangement of rooms can also be seen in the workshop wing, which, as
well as housing workshops and the heating plant, had lecture rooms which could
be recombined into a single display room. The two-storey bridge contained
administrative offices and later the architectural department. The technical
school wing was originally planned as an arts and crafts school and was used
for classrooms, library etc. The gym was in the basement of the students’
building just below the canteen kitchen. Gropius’ idea was to design the
building to be functional and economic and yet not sacrifice the
social/psychological needs of its users. However the emphasis is very much on
technology and away from arts and crafts. ‘Technology does not need art, but
art very much needs technology – example: architecture!’
Gropius’ Master Houses. Sited in a group of pine
trees close to the Bauhaus are seven units: one single house for the Director
and three duplexes. Using duplication of design reduces the cost, ‘the floor
plan of one of the two homes is the mirror image of floor plan of the other one,
interlocked, and turned by 90° degrees.’ Yet ‘Studio, stairwell,
kitchen, pantry and bathroom face north avoiding the direct rays of the sun;
living, dining, bedrooms and children’s room with garden, terraces, balconies
and roof gardens face the sun.’ The
orientation is achieved by having a fixed central unit but rotating (with the
north facing windows) but rotating the rest and placing windows on the
requisite wall eg. South. Smooth white walls, horizontal rows of windows,
spacious terraces, including roof which is flat. In other words fairly typical
international style.
In the Bauhaus at this time, in charge of the Preliminary
Course, was Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. He was concerned with making students aware of
three-dimensional, sculptural relationships and tensions. Construction
exercises were conducted in wood, sheet metal, wire, string and other
materials. Josef Albers also taught in this course and took it over in 1928.
His approach was to study individual materials in greater depth. For example,,
working with scissors and paper. By the action of cutting and folding, the
student had to produce interesting patterns and structures while still using
the material economically. Albers also become head of the furniture workshop in
1928 and stayed until the Dessau Bauhaus closed in 1933.
The Printing Workshop (Typography and Commercial Art) was
lead by Herbert Bayer from 1925 to 1928. Words were often emphasised by playful
changes in colour, usually from black to red on an otherwise ‘contourless
shadow script’. Another favourite device was to change the orientation of part
of the text by 90 degrees. The use of blocks and lines in and around the text
broke up the type for which sans-serif or ‘universal type’ was typical with
dropped capital letters. This provided a clarity of design and a contrast
between the text and the paper with strong blacks on white: no use of grey. The
influence of Lissitsky can be seen in the decorative handling of type in the
reproductions of Mayokovsky’s poems. Schmidt took over from Bayer in 1928.
Georg Muche and Gunta Stölzl were officially in charge
of the Weaving Workshop but, in effect, it was a co-operative with
students like Ann Albers contributing greatly. Designs tended to become much
more clear-cut and geometric over time. The one-of, hand-made, craft object was
rapidly submerged in what Gunta Stölzl called ‘the slogan of this new
area: prototypes for industry!’
Up to 1928 Moholy-Nagy was in charge of the Metal
Workshop which produced things like light fitments. They used aluminium
quite a lot but the idea of attaching shallow glass dishes directly to the
ceiling, with or without metal frames, probably originated at the Bauhaus.
Similarly the idea of combining opaque and frosted glass. Jointed, movable lamp
arms were another innovation. Several of these designs were taken up by
manufacturers.
Upon the move to Dessau the Furniture Workshop was
given over to Marcel Breuer who consequently bought himself his first bike to
get about the campus. So the story goes, he was innocently admiring his new
possession one day when the handle bars suddenly gave him the inspiration for
tubular steel furniture. His tubular steel chair of 1925 was made out of
nickel-plated tubing with the seat, back and arm rests made from iron yarn. The
objective was to design furniture which did not hinder the movement of the body
or the eye and was functional and standardised. He also designed stools,
ordinary chairs, swivel-chairs, folding chairs, theatre chairs, tables and so
on in tubular steel. They were very light and mobile but strong. Above all they
were relatively cheap to manufacture. Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928.
Gropius’ Dessau Labour Office of 1927-29 was a steel
skeleton structure filled in with leather-coloured brick. The plan had to make
it possible for a small staff of officials to cope with a large number of
people seeking employment. From that basic requirement has resulted a semi-circular
floor plan enabling large waiting rooms, divided into segments according to
vocational groups to funnel towards the smaller counselling rooms. Changes in
demand for different groups could be accommodated by re-arranging flexible partitions
in the interior passages. The offices in the inner part of the semi-circle
received daylight from skylights. The part of the Labour Office not dealing
directly with the public were accommodated in an adjacent two-storey
administrative block.
Gropius’ Dessau-Törten Housing Development
of 1926-28 was sited on sand and gravel usable for concrete mixing. The units
were therefore cheaply constructed on site including a co-operative store. The
development was for working-class families who had to rely on extra income or
self-support from garden produce and keeping a few farm animals. So Gropius constructed
small two-storey houses, each for a single family, arranged in rows where each
had access to a long narrow strip of garden. Other buildings at Törten
included one by Carl Fieger, a draftsman in Gropius’ architectural studio, who
designed and built his own house on the periphery of the development in 1927,
plus Georg Muche and Richard Paulick’s steel house of 1926.
Gropius’s Prefabricated House was designed and built
for the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 in Stuttgart. This was an economic,
industrially manufactured, single storey dwelling.
Under personal attack and criticism from outside the
Bauhaus, Gropius decided to leave in 1928. He asked Mies van der Rohe to become
his successor, but he declined. So Hannes Meyer took over on 1st
April 1928. Hannes Meyer had been appointed head of the newly created
architecture department the year before.
Hannes Meyer now designed the second phase of the Törten
Housing Estate which was built between 1928 to 1930 for some 8000 inhabitants.
Meyer’s approach to design was much more collective. He regarded building as no
longer being an individual task in which individual ambition and fantasies are
realised. He designed it in collaboration with the building section of the
Bauhaus, regarding practical experience as essential for the student. Twelve
students, along with Meyer, were responsible for the plans as well as helping
to superintend the work on site. Zigzag rows of one-storey self-contained houses
with gardens were planned for middle-class income families. Working class
families were to live in three-storey blocks, each containing eighteen
three-room flats, or in four-storey blocks along the western edge of the site.
However only five of the three-storey blocks were constructed by 1930.
Meyer reorganised the architectural course with a scientific and
social rather than formal emphasis. In the manifesto bauen in the bauhaus
magazine of 1928 he wrote that building is a biological process involving
social, technical and economic organisation. ‘What is modern about this estate
is not the flat roof and vertical-horizontal division of the façade but its
direct relationship with human existence.’ In other words he is anti-formalist
and regards the Dessau Bauhaus as a social rather than artistic influencer. ‘We
are not seeking a Bauhaus style or a Bauhaus fashion. No modishly flat plane
surface ornamentation divided horizontally and vertically and all done up in neoplastic
style. We are not seeking geometric or stereometric constructions, alien to
life and inimical to function.’ His practice and teaching was basically along
functional and collectivist lines. He taught that building was not art but a
piece of machinery that served the needs of body and mind. All thinking in
functional and biological terms would lead logically to pure construction.
Other teachers in the architecture department were Ludwig Hilberseimer
who conducted classes in construction design, Anton Bremner who was head of the
building studio, Mart Stam who was a guest lecturer in city planning and
architectural principles, Alear Rudelt who taught structural engineering and
Wilhelm Müller who gave instruction in building materials.
Meyer’s Federal School of the General German Trade Unions
Federation was built in Bernau, near Berlin, in 1928 to 1930. Six
architects were invited to submit designs in a competition. They were Max Berg,
Alois Klement, Willy Ludewig, Erich Mendelsohn, Max Taut and Hannes Meyer.
Although this was a private commission for Hannes Meyer the fact that he says
he never designs alone suggests that other people at the Bauhaus also
contributed to the design. The 120 Trades Union students of both sexes were
organised into 12 cells, each of 10 members. Within these cells were five
double rooms. Each cell ate together, studied together and formed a section in
physical training. The purpose of the rigid grouping was to give the individual
worker, during their comparatively short stay, the opportunity to identify with
the communal life of the school as quickly as possible through having a
room-mate and contact with a small group within each cell. All twelve cells
could be assembled together with the teaching staff and guests in the big
lecture hall, the dining room or stadium. The teaching staff lived with their
families in separated flats, not as a gesture of social superiority but in
order to preserve the character of family life in their own group or unit. The
buildings were constructed of reinforced concrete and had an oil-fired heating
system. Colour coded lights were used to help the visitor navigate through the
settlement. The concourse was green, yellow, blue or red and inside the three
residential wings the basic reddish colour changed from scarlet to vermilion,
to pink and to three cell colours on the wall of the entrance to each corridor.
The main lecture hall, with its 200 seats, incorporated a number of
technological innovations. At the touch of a button the lecturer could increase
or decrease the size of the 45 foot wide hall window in the manner of a camera
aperture. Another button set maps, diagrams or pictures into position and
another button determined the level of lighting. In the residences there was
only one WC, shower and bath per level which seems inadequate. There is a
glazed connecting corridor from the school building, past the residences, to
the community building. This corridor was designed to look out upon the
surrounding forest landscape.
Another building partly designed and executed by the Bauhaus
building students was Hans Volger’s Physician’s Residence at Mayen in
the Eifel region in 1928.
Meyer’s leadership, and in particular his suppression of the
artistic ambitions of his students, was controversial within the Bauhaus. There
was also mounting opposition from outside the institution stemming from Meyer’s
political stance. In August 1930, while the Bauhaus was officially on holiday
between terms, the Mayor of Dessau took the opportunity of Meyer’s voluntary
contribution as a private person to the International Workers’ Aid Fund for the
assistance of striking miners’ families, to dismiss him from post without
notice. Yet Meyer’s spell at the Bauhaus had already been productive. Essential
funds were coming in from royalties on designs which had been picked up by
industry, travelling exhibitions were helping to publicise the work of the
Bauhaus and there were several outstanding commissions for the building
department. The town council had asked for a tourist office, model houses for
the lower middle-classes, plans for housing 15000 new inhabitants and proposals
for restructuring the town market. Other clients had asked for the physician’s
house in Mayern, a tuberculosis sanitorium and an angler’s village near Berlin.
The school reopened in the autumn of 1930 under the more
formalist Mies van der Rohe. Mies’ approach to architecture during this period
was to concentrate on one-of, fairly luxurious, residences. Balance was
maintained by Ludewig Hilberseimer who continued to teach the problems of
economics and standardisation in housing developments. Mies invited the
interior designer Lilly Reich to the Bauhuus and merged the workshop for
interior design (which was already the metal workshop and furniture workshop
combined0 with the architecture department.
Mies designed a house in 1930 for the manufacturer Tugendhat
in Brünn.
It has a free-standing partition of onyx and a semi-circular wall of Macassar
Ebony. He utilises a simple arrangement of distinctive materials. The outdoor
garden patio was designed to make the transition from inside to outside flow
more easily. The large glass planes help integrate the two, some of which can
be lowered into the floor. At night the glass is hidden by untreated silk
curtains. The chairs, upholstered with white sheepskin, natural coloured
pigskin, and pale green cowhide, are set against white linoleum and sheepskin
rugs. The house is entered from the top floor. Most of the space in the
interior is continuous, divided only by free-standing walls; except for the
bedrooms, which are enclosed boxes.
In the Berlin
Building Exhibition of 1931 Mies’ house has only the kitchen and servant
quarters isolated from the main space. Two bedrooms, screened from the living
area, are partially separated from each other by a bathroom. The inner walls
are largely glass and a patio adjoins the bedrooms. Regularly placed metal
columns are contrasted with the freely placed outer walls.
In October 1932 the government of Dessau, which had acquired
a National Socialist majority, closed the school and illegally terminated its
contract. Mies then converted the Bauhaus into a private institution and
transferred it to an abandoned telephone directory building in Berlin. However
in April the Gestapo, searching for Communist literature, closed it down.
Copyright Ade Annabel 1981
