Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany

German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.

The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.

The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.

Tags:   Bauhaus Museum Weimar Germany Hanada minimalist concrete modern architecture box collection design school international competition

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Reconstruction Bauhaus masters' houses Dessau Germany / Bruno Fioretti Marquez - 2014
Parallel to the Bauhaus Building, the city of Dessau commissioned Walter Gropius to construct three pairs of identical semi-detached houses for the Bauhaus masters and a detached house for the director. These were built in a small pine wood near the Bauhaus school building. Gropius planned to build the complex based on a modular principle, using industrially prefabricated components. With this he wished to realise the principles of rational construction, both in the architecture and in the process of building. In view of the technical resources available at the time, his plan was only partially realised. The buildings take the form of interlocking cubic structures of various heights. Towards the street the semi-detached houses are distinguished by generously glazed studios; vertical strip windows on the sides let light into the staircases. Only the director’s house featured an asymmetric arrangement of windows. The light-coloured houses have generously-sized terraces and balconies and feature colourful accents on the window reveals, the undersides of the balconies and the drainpipes.
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy furnished their houses entirely with furniture by Marcel Breuer, while other masters brought their own furniture with them. All of the houses were fitted with built-in cupboards and modern household appliances. The list of residents reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of modernists: László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, along with their families. Others lived here later, including Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper and Alfred Arndt. For the colour design of the interiors, artists such as Klee and Kandinsky developed own ideas that were closely related to their works. After the closure of the Bauhaus in 1932 the houses were let to third parties. The director’s house was destroyed in the war. Work on its reconstruction began just a few years ago. The rest of the complex was extensively renovated in 1992. The house that Kandinsky and Klee originally lived in and decorated is particularly fascinating on account of its colourfulness.
The Kandinsky/Klee Master House was reopened to visitors in 2019 after extensive restoration work. After the restoration, the Kandinsky/Klee Master House will give visitors the opportunity to experience with all their senses the life of Bauhaus masters in the surroundings they created themselves. Colours and furnishings depict the artistically shaped living and working environment, which was in contrast to Walter Gropius' design, especially in the Kandinsky/Klee Master House.
After the Bauhauslers moved out in 1932, the Masters’ Houses were radically transformed by modifications. Gropius House and Moholy-Nagy House were destroyed in an air raid in the final days of WWII. In the GDR era a single-family home with a pitched roof was erected on the foundations of Gropius House, but this was demolished again later. The gaps left behind in the ensemble of buildings were closed in 2014. A historically accurate reconstruction was rejected; Berlin-based architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez (BFM) created an ‘architecture of imprecision’ for the two demolished buildings. This evokes a deliberate sense of oscillation between specific historic state and reinterpretation. Emerging from the residential architecture designed by Walter Gropius in 1926 is an open spatial structure, which is used for exhibitions. Artist Olaf Nicolai has designed an installation for both buildings, which is inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s theories and in which abstraction and figuration interact. The Colour of Light (2014) links the texture of the render with the effects of daylight.

Tags:   Bauhaus masters' houses Dessau Germany Meisterhäuser Kandinsky Klee Gropius Moholy-Nagy modernism modern architecture rational construction Marquez concrete

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Bauhaus masters' houses Dessau Germany / Walter Gropius - 1926
Parallel to the Bauhaus Building, the city of Dessau commissioned Walter Gropius to construct three pairs of identical semi-detached houses for the Bauhaus masters and a detached house for the director. These were built in a small pine wood near the Bauhaus school building. Gropius planned to build the complex based on a modular principle, using industrially prefabricated components. With this he wished to realise the principles of rational construction, both in the architecture and in the process of building. In view of the technical resources available at the time, his plan was only partially realised. The buildings take the form of interlocking cubic structures of various heights. Towards the street the semi-detached houses are distinguished by generously glazed studios; vertical strip windows on the sides let light into the staircases. Only the director’s house featured an asymmetric arrangement of windows. The light-coloured houses have generously-sized terraces and balconies and feature colourful accents on the window reveals, the undersides of the balconies and the drainpipes.
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy furnished their houses entirely with furniture by Marcel Breuer, while other masters brought their own furniture with them. All of the houses were fitted with built-in cupboards and modern household appliances. The list of residents reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of modernists: László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, along with their families. Others lived here later, including Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper and Alfred Arndt. For the colour design of the interiors, artists such as Klee and Kandinsky developed own ideas that were closely related to their works. After the closure of the Bauhaus in 1932 the houses were let to third parties. The director’s house was destroyed in the war. Work on its reconstruction began just a few years ago. The rest of the complex was extensively renovated in 1992. The house that Kandinsky and Klee originally lived in and decorated is particularly fascinating on account of its colourfulness.
The Kandinsky/Klee Master House was reopened to visitors in 2019 after extensive restoration work. After the restoration, the Kandinsky/Klee Master House will give visitors the opportunity to experience with all their senses the life of Bauhaus masters in the surroundings they created themselves. Colours and furnishings depict the artistically shaped living and working environment, which was in contrast to Walter Gropius' design, especially in the Kandinsky/Klee Master House.
After the Bauhauslers moved out in 1932, the Masters’ Houses were radically transformed by modifications. Gropius House and Moholy-Nagy House were destroyed in an air raid in the final days of WWII. In the GDR era a single-family home with a pitched roof was erected on the foundations of Gropius House, but this was demolished again later. The gaps left behind in the ensemble of buildings were closed in 2014. A historically accurate reconstruction was rejected; Berlin-based architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez (BFM) created an ‘architecture of imprecision’ for the two demolished buildings. This evokes a deliberate sense of oscillation between specific historic state and reinterpretation. Emerging from the residential architecture designed by Walter Gropius in 1926 is an open spatial structure, which is used for exhibitions. Artist Olaf Nicolai has designed an installation for both buildings, which is inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s theories and in which abstraction and figuration interact. The Colour of Light (2014) links the texture of the render with the effects of daylight.

Tags:   Bauhaus masters' houses Dessau Germany Meisterhäuser Kandinsky Klee Gropius Moholy-Nagy modernism modern architecture rational construction Marquez concrete

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Bauhaus Dessau, Germany - architect Walter Gropius, 1925-'26

"The basic structure of the Bauhaus consists of a clear and carefully thought-out system of connecting wings, which correspond to the internal operating system of the school. The technical construction of the building... is demonstrated by the latest technological development of the time: a skeleton of reinforced concrete with brickwork, mushroom-shaped ceilings on the lower level, and roofs covered with asphalt tile that can be walked upon. The construction area consisted of 32,450 cubic meters and the total cost amounted to 902,500 marks. Such an economical achievement was possible only due to the assistance of the Bauhaus teachers and students, which at the same time, of course, could be viewed as an ideal means of education."

- from Udo Kultermann. Architecture in the 20th Century.

Tags:   Bauhaus Dessau modern architecture Walter Gropius school arts crafts students education

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Bauhaus masters' houses Dessau Germany / Walter Gropius - 1926

After the Bauhauslers moved out in 1932, the Masters’ Houses were radically transformed by modifications. Gropius House and Moholy-Nagy House were destroyed in an air raid in the final days of WWII. In the GDR era a single-family home with a pitched roof was erected on the foundations of Gropius House, but this was demolished again later. The gaps left behind in the ensemble of buildings were closed in 2014. A historically accurate reconstruction was rejected; Berlin-based architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez (BFM) created an ‘architecture of imprecision’ for the two demolished buildings. This evokes a deliberate sense of oscillation between specific historic state and reinterpretation. Emerging from the residential architecture designed by Walter Gropius in 1926 is an open spatial structure, which is used for exhibitions. Artist Olaf Nicolai has designed an installation for both buildings, which is inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s theories and in which abstraction and figuration interact. The Colour of Light (2014) links the texture of the render with the effects of daylight.

Tags:   Bauhaus masters' houses Dessau Germany Meisterhäuser Kandinsky Klee Gropius Moholy-Nagy modernism modern architecture rational construction Marquez concrete

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