John Pardey on Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus in Dessau — a crystalline composition of glass, concrete and functionally ordered forms that transformed a new school of design into the built manifesto of a revolution in modern architecture, industry and education.
(Credit: A.Savin via Wikipedia Commons)
This article is part of a monthly series of short essays on some of the greatest buildings of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Read John Pardey’s introduction to the series here.
The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art – sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts – as inseparable components of a new architecture.”
— Walter Gropius
In 1908, in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens, one of the fathers of the Modern Movement, three young architects were starting out on their careers: Mies van der Rohe, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and Walter Gropius. These architects were to dominate European architecture in the same way that the painters in Montmartre in the decades prior to this were to redefine art in the new age.
Jeanneret was to reinvent himself as Le Corbusier in the early 1920s and become the dominant figure in architecture. Mies van der Rohe was to strip his architecture back to its essence, and his commercial buildings were to exert enormous influence on cities around the world, while Gropius was to be remembered for his influence on industrial and product design.
(Credit: Gunnar Klack via Wikipedia Commons)
Gropius worked in the office of Behrens until 1910 when he established a practice with his former colleague, Adolf Meyer. Within three years they had completed one of the pioneering Modernist buildings of the period: the Fagus Werk building in Alfeld, Germany, a factory making shoe lasts (wooden or cast-iron moulds). This took the idea of Behrens’ 1909 AEG turbine factory in Berlin with its ‘curtain wall’ of glass to a new level, with the glazing attached to a concrete frame, enabling it to turn corners. It demonstrated the maxim that ‘form follows function’, and the factory is now regarded as one of the crucial founding buildings of European Modernism.
Gropius published an article in 1913 titled, The Development of Modern Industrial Architecture, which was to prove highly influential on both Jeanneret (then rebranded as Le Corbusier) and Erich Mendelsohn who both reprinted his images of grain elevators in the USA between 1920 and 1930. But his career was interrupted in 1914 with the outbreak of World War 1. He was drafted to the Western Front, and served as a sergeant major, before getting wounded and receiving the Iron Cross for bravery.
(Credit: Gunnar Klack via Wikipedia Commons)
After the war, the master of the Arts and Crafts School in Weimar, Henry van der Velde, was asked to step aside due to his Belgian nationality and he put Gropius forward to succeed him. He took over as Director in 1919 and renamed the school, The Bauhaus (House for Building’). His manifesto called for collaboration between artists and craftsmen – arts and crafts – to create beauty and quality through industrially produced objects: ‘Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unit.’
Facing political and financial difficulties in Weimar, the school moved to Dessau in 1925 and the city funded a new building. Gropius was to design the new building which was completed the following year near the banks of the River Elbe. The plan is a functionally- zoned pinwheel, creating a building with no front or back. It has three arms linked by a bridge structure. Each wing has a different function: workshops, school of arts and crafts, and auditorium and café, with a dormitory at the far end. Administration spaces are located in the bridge.
(Credit: JensKunstfreund via Wikipedia Commons)
The building owes much to the principles of De Stijl, creating a dynamic and balanced composition. Built with a reinforced concrete frame and enclosed by white rendered and glass curtain walls beneath flat roofs, it provided some 10,500-square-metres of accommodation. The workshop wing was wrapped in a three-storey glass curtain wall with opening ranks of sash windows operated by a system of chains and pulleys – building as a machine – so that it became a magical box of light at night.
The plan allowed unexpected views through, and reflections in, the glazed envelope, that the writer Sigfried Giedion described as an example of space-time visual effects, produced by hovering relations of planes and the kind of overlapping which appears on contemporary painting. The other wings had Corbusian ribbon windows in white rendered facades, and the taller six-storey-high block for residential accommodation had cantilevered balconies.
Gropius wrote, ‘One must walk around this structure in order to understand the three-dimensional character of its form and the function of its parts.’ The interior was to become a demonstration of the Bauhaus principles, with Marcel Breuer designing the first large-scale use of tubular steel furniture, innovative light fittings produced in the workshop, and even door handles designed by Gropius, which are still in production today.
(Credit: Lorkan via Wikipedia Commons)
Gropius was to resign as the Director of the Bauhaus in March 1928, precipitated by economic and organisational difficulties that marred his relationship with Dessau’s mayor Fritz Hesse, formerly its most important political supporter. In 1931 the National Socialist party seized power in Germany, and dismissed all foreign teachers and even discussed the demolition of the Bauhaus building. The school was closed in August 1932. Gropius returned to Berlin but as Hitler rose to power and architects were expected to join the Reicshkulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) headed by Josef Goebbels, there was no longer any architecture beyond state control.
Despite appealing to the regime that functional architecture could provide a new modern German character, this fell on deaf ears and Gropius moved to London in 1934. He teamed up with Maxwell Fry, but they did not enjoy great success. It was to be the dean of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that offered him a future as professor in the department of Architecture, a post he held until his retirement in 1952.
The Bauhaus building was completely burned out after being hit by a bomb in March 1945. It was finally designated a historical monument in 1972 and consequently underwent extensive restoration for the first time. It was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996. With its clear forms based on function and its drive towards uniting art and technology, the Bauhaus building in Dessau created the built manifesto of a revolution in design and education.
