John Pardey on Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus in Dessau– a crystalline composition of glass, concrete and functionally purchased types that transformed a new school of design into the constructed manifesto of a revolution in contemporary architecture, market and education.(Credit: A.Savin by means of Wikipedia Commons)This post is part of a month-to-month series of brief essays on
a few of the greatest structures of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Read John Pardey’s introduction to the series here. The Bauhaus makes every effort to combine all innovative effort into one
whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art– sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts– as inseparable elements of a new architecture.”– Walter Gropius In 1908, in the Berlin workplace of Peter Behrens, one of the fathers of the Modern Motion, three young
architects were starting on their professions: Mies van der Rohe, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and Walter Gropius. These architects were to control European architecture in the same way that the painters in Montmartre in the years 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 industrial structures were to exert enormous influence on cities around the world, while Gropius was to be kept in mind for his influence on industrial and item design.(Credit: Gunnar Klack via Wikipedia Commons)Gropius worked in the office of Behrens up until 1910 when he established a practice with his previous associate, Adolf Meyer. Within three years they had actually completed among the
pioneering Modernist structures of the duration: the Fagus Werk structure in Alfeld, Germany, a factory making shoe lasts( wooden or cast-iron moulds). This took the concept of Behrens’1909 AEG turbine factory in Berlin with its’drape wall’ of glass to a new level, with the glazing connected to a concrete frame, allowing it to turn corners. It showed the maxim that’ type follows function ‘, and the factory is now considered as one of the crucial founding structures of European Modernism. Gropius released a post in 1913 entitled, The Development of Modern Industrial Architecture, which was to show highly prominent on both Jeanneret(then rebranded as Le Corbusier)and Erich Mendelsohn who both reprinted his pictures of grain elevators in the U.S.A. in between 1920 and 1930. However his profession was interrupted in 1914 with the break out of World War 1. He was prepared to the Western Front, and worked as a sergeant significant, before getting wounded and receiving the Iron Cross for bravery. (Credit: Gunnar Klack by means of 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 prosper him. He took control of as Director in 1919 and relabelled the school, The Bauhaus(Home for Building’ ). His manifesto called for cooperation between artists and craftsmen– arts and crafts– to create beauty and quality through industrially produced objects:’ Let us then develop a brand-new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier in between artisan and artist! Together let us desire, develop and create the new structure of the future, which will welcome architecture and sculpture and painting in one system.’Facing political and monetary problems in Weimar, the school transferred to Dessau in 1925 and the city funded a new structure. Gropius was to develop the new structure which was finished the following year near the banks of the River Elbe. The plan is a functionally-zoned pinwheel, developing a building with no front or back. It has three arms connected by a bridge structure. Each wing has a different function: workshops, school of arts and crafts, and auditorium and café, with a dorm at the back. Administration spaces are located in the bridge.(Credit: JensKunstfreund via Wikipedia Commons)The building owes much to the concepts of De Stijl, developing a dynamic and balanced composition. Developed
with a reinforced concrete frame and confined by white
rendered and glass curtain walls underneath flat roofs, it offered 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 pulley-blocks– building as a machine– so that it became a wonderful box of light at night. The strategy allowed unforeseen views through, and reflections in, the glazed envelope, that the author Sigfried Giedion referred to as an example of space-time visual impacts, produced by hovering relations
of planes and the sort 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 domestic accommodation had actually cantilevered terraces. Gropius wrote,’One should walk this structure in order to understand the three-dimensional character of its type and the function of its parts.’ The interior was to end up being a demonstration of the Bauhaus concepts, with Marcel Breuer developing the first massive usage of tubular steel furniture, innovative light fittings produced in the workshop, and even door manages designed by Gropius, which are still in production today.( Credit: Lorkan through Wikipedia Commons) Gropius was to resign as the Director of the Bauhaus in March 1928, precipitated by economic and organisational problems that ruined his relationship with Dessau’s mayor Fritz Hesse, previously its essential political advocate. In 1931 the National Socialist party took 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 anticipated to join the Reicshkulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture)headed by Josef Goebbels, there was no longer any architecture beyond state control. Regardless of appealing to the regime that functional architecture might offer a brand-new contemporary German character, this fell on deaf ears and Gropius relocated to London in 1934. He coordinated with Maxwell Fry, however they did not take pleasure in fantastic success. It was to be the dean of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that offered him a future as teacher in the department of Architecture, a post he held up until his retirement in 1952. The Bauhaus structure was completely burned out after being hit by a bomb in March 1945. It was finally designated a historic monument in 1972 and subsequently went through extensive repair for the very first time. It was contributed to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996. With its clear forms based upon function and its drive towards joining art and innovation, the Bauhaus building in Dessau developed the constructed manifesto of a revolution in style and education.