Читать книгу Bauhaus. 1919-1933 - Michael Siebenbrodt - Страница 15

The opportunity to build was one of the decisive reasons for Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus moving to Dessau. Here, many Bauhaus projects for which the city or co-operatives acted as clients could be carried out from the beginning. On the basis of this, municipal as well as residential buildings were created in rapid succession between 1925 and 1929, for which architect and Bauhaus director Walter Gropius coined the name “Bauhaus buildings.” Designed in Gropius’s private construction offices or together with teachers and students at the school and executed by regional contractors as well as in the Bauhaus workshops, a broad spectrum of modern architecture was created which to this day attracts interested visitors from all over the world. This includes the Bauhaus building itself, the Masters’ houses, the former unemployment office and housing developments in Törten, a district in the south of the city. Yet Gropius’s buildings, especially the housing developments in Törten, were extremely controversial at the time. Problems of structural physics and finance, as well as aesthetic aspects, were intensely discussed in daily newspapers and technical publications of the mid 1930s. In the articles, objectively existing defects reported by the inhabitants as well as aesthetically and politically-motivated negativity and concerns about a new type of design of space and object played a part. Furthermore, Gropius’s buildings in Dessau had often been used as examples of the radicalism of modern architecture without concern for location or history. It was ignored that especially the housing developments in Törten and the Masters’ houses bore an unapparent but subtle relation to the history of architecture and regional particularities, a reception of the English garden-city-movement and the late 18th century garden empire in Dessau-Wörlitz.

In the experimental climate of the Bauhaus in Dessau, a number of visionary plans were created which related to urban concepts and projections. One of the reasons for this was the general desire to develop the city of Dessau from the “royal city of yesterday” into a “city of industry and traffic” in order to overcome its “previously very conservative”[8] attitude toward cultural matters and to conserve its cultural identity as it confronted the modern industrial age. The Bauhaus was assigned an important role in this transformation process. Despite ample hostility and obstructions, the Bauhaus in Dessau had without a doubt become a place of experimental questioning and momentum for the development of the city of Dessau and beyond. Its international fame and general reputation grew particularly after the opening of the new school building and the construction of further Bauhaus buildings. Both then and now up to seven hundred visitors a day would travel to Dessau to visit the Bauhaus and its buildings.

Bauhaus Dessau, Semester plan, 1927

Hannes Meyer, Bauhaus Dessau, Model of the organisation, 1930

Hannes Meyer, Model of the Bauhaus organisation and its links with the outside world, 1930

Hannes Meyer before the drawing table, c. 1926