How The Bauhaus Changed Dessau

Hello Everyone:

Welcome to a fresh week on the blog.  The Candidate Forum wanted to let you all know that on Wednesday, barring the release of the special counsel's report, we will be discussing former Massachusetts Governor William Weld's same party challenge to Mr. Donald Trump.  Also The Candidate Forum is eagerly awaiting announcements from former Vice President Joe Biden and Texas Representative Robert "Beto" O'Rourke's decisions on the presidential race.  In the meantime, we have a really great subject today, the Bauhaus.

Bauhaus campus
Dessau, Germany
archdaily.com

Happy 100th Birthday to the Bauhaus School of Art and Design.  The Bauhaus, "construction house" in English, was founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius.  As a school, the Bauhaus was based in three cities: Weimar (1919-25), Dessau (1925-32), and Berlin (1932-33) until the Nazis forced its closure.  During its short-lived history, it exerted a great deal of influence on architecture, art, and design that continues to be felt right up to today (mymodernnet.com; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019).  However, the Bauhaus movement was more than just an art and design movement, it transformed the city of Dessau during its seven year tenure.

Dessau, Germany
en.wikipedia.org

Today, the city is a shadow of its former cultured self and remains a pilgrimage site, of sorts, for architects, artists, and designers.  The campus remains but the surrounding buildings are in a state of elegant decline.  Even so, the hundredth anniversary of the school's founding might change that.  The city is planning a program of events (bauhaus.com-dessau.de; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) and a full, sensitive rehabilitation of the remaining Bauhaus-affiliated structures.  On the surface, Dessau might not appear to the glamorous magnet for artistic and social revolution that Berlin may be but Feargus O'Sullivan points out "it's more innovative than it looks" (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).  Since the beginning of the 2000s, Dessau has found an innovative way to continue the tradition of experimental design through a form of creative deconstruction.

Mr. O'Sullivan observes, "Much has been made in the past of the improbable contrast between the progressive ferment of the Bauhaus and the doughy provincialism of the 1920s Dessau" (Ibid).  Dessau is a medium-sized, half way between the German capital and the city of Leipzig and did marinate a partial backlash to the school when it landed on their doorstep.  The civic associations fussed and fumed about it in the local media.  However, its progressive leadership and the courtship by then-mayor Fritz Hesse (de.m.wikipedia.org; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) that brought the Bauhaus to Dessau, instead of its competitor Mannheim (mz.de; Feb. 16, 2019; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019).  Mayor Hesse promised funding for the school's construction and agreed to grant the school a fraction of the city building contracts during their stay (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).  A very lucrative deal


The result was "the city not only with an entire quarter (now much altered) of Bauhaus-designed affordable housing, but also such oddities as the unlikely but sparely beautiful Carl Fieger (de.m.wikipedia.org; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) Kornhaus (Ibid) cafe/restaurant, commissioned by the city and built on the city's outskirts..."(citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019)

Dessau's generosity made it uniquely attractive to the Bauhaus, but there was much more to the decision to relocate from Weimar.  Weimar was a non-industrial city, once home to Bach, Goethe, and Schiller, eventually making any artistic activity subordinate to institutional German cultural tradition.  In its original home, the Bauhaus continued under the sway of Expressionism and the Arts and Crafts (en.m.wikipedia.org; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019).  Mr. O'Sullivan writes, "These were approaches that, in foregrounding the expression of the individual artist's consciousness, harked back to a pre-industrial craft tradition, even as they warily began using mas production to reproduce and disseminate their work" (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).

Dessau-Torten Housing Estate
Walter Gropius (1926-26
bauhaus-dessau.de

Dessau was a completely different setting, without any historical German cultural context.  Rather, it was a major industrial city, with factories "specializing in machine assembly, aircraft fabrication, gas-heater manufacture among others" (Ibid).  Perfect for a curriculum that wanted to blur the line between art and technology.  Bauhaus director Walter Gropius already was gravitating toward a keen interest in systematization  and functionality for some time by the time Weimar cut off funding for the school.  Dessau's multi-pronged industrial production and lack of cultural baggage provided a tabla rasa, the ideal context for a new direction.

Kornhaus
Carl Fieger (1929-30)
commons.wikimedia.org

Dessau responded by allowing itself to act as a laboratory for the school's experiments.  During the school's seven-year stay, the city commissioned Walter Gropius to design an entire neighborhood of affordable housing (bauhaus-dessau.de; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) on the city's southern fringe, "transforming chosen location into a sort of a factory, in which elements such as concrete joists were shipped but fabricated onsite"(citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).  Walter Gropius also designed a new employment office (de.m.wikipedia.org; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) which featured an interior flooded wit natural light pouring through rows of skylight windows, which acted as roof tiles.  The school also created experimental prototypes, like the Stahlhaus, in order to test prefabricated steel plates.  Most important, especially for architecture addicts, the Bauhaus designed its own now-iconic headquarters with a plate glass curtain wall to flood the studios with natural light.

The importance of the experimental nature of these buildings cannot be stressed enough.  They were models that not always worked.   For example, Dessau-Torten ended up being very quickly remodeled and the famous Bauhaus HQ curtain wall resulted in extreme fluctuations in temperature.  Workers in the Walter Gropius-designed Employment office may have liked the skylights but really wanted windows placed at eye-levels.  Be that as it may, nearly a century later, the building are still relevant, blending seamlessly into the urban fabric, "in which almost all later buildings show the stamp of Bauhaus influence" (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).

Dessau has never experienced anything quite as culturally influential since.  When the school's funding was cancelled in 1932 following the Nazi takeover of the municipal government, the Bauhaus moved to Berlin for one final difficult year.  Meanwhile the Dessau building suffered all manner of indignities, functioning until wartime bombing set it on fire, destroying the famed glass curtain wall.  Following the War, it was repaired with concrete and re-opened as a vocational college.  The Bauhaus itself was first restored to something resembling its former glory in the 1970s before beginning taken over by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in 1994.

In the meantime, Dessau was getting for an exciting second act, setting itself up, albeit on a small-scale, for a creative transformation.  This time, the impetus was industrial decline.

Like many cities in eastern Germany, Dessau's economy dramatically fell following reunification.  Feargus O'Sullivan reports, "Tariff-free competition from western Germany and further afield swallowed up markets for the city's factories [which largely, but not exclusively (de.m.wikipedia.org; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019), failed soon after their privatization] and thousands of citizens left in search of work in the west" (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).  He adds, "Between 1990 and 2006 the newly amalgamated city of Dessau-Rosslau's (en.m.wikipedia.org; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) population fell by 18 percent [from 111,396 to 91,243]" (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).  The mortality rate was double the birth rate, making it quite clear that things were going in reverse.  The street emptied out and buildings fell into disrepair.

This sad situation was happening across whole regions in eastern Germany, thus bolder plans were needed to stop deterioration.  Dessau decided to remodel through demolition, razing buildings and create green space through the urban core, around which neighborhoods would serve as "city islands (economist.com; Apr. 10, 2008; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019), "areas of concentrated settlement and activity set in an altogether  lusher calmer landscape" (citylab.com; Mar. 11, 2019).

Since the beginning of the millennium, up to 2010, Dessau opened up 22 acres of space with grass, trees, and paths.  The city plan was layered with a overlaid with a 400 square meter grid and the citizens were invited to takeover  and make it their own.  Citizen groups began to remake the patches for growing produce, recreational and cultural spaces.  The Bauhau Dessau Foundation was at the core of the process, mounting in 2010 an exhibition called "The Future is Less" (link.springer.com; March 2011; date accessed Mar. 11, 2019) which focused on creative responses to urban shrinkage.

This process has Blogger thinking about how might the lessons of Dessau's approach to urban shrinkage might apply to American cities which are experiencing the same symptoms.  It would be fascinating to see how a city, like Cleveland, could apply the concept of creative destruction to blighted areas.  Buffalo has turned abandoned grain silos into cultural spaces and Detroit has flirted creating community farms on the former sites of blighted houses.  Dessau was the ideal site for the Bauhaus' creative zenith.  The school was able to incorporate the lessons in mass production with the Arts and Crafts to create architecture and design in the post-World War I machine age.  Happy Birthday Bauhaus and here is to the next 100 years.