Bauhaus. 1919-1933. Michael Siebenbrodt
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Название: Bauhaus. 1919-1933
Автор: Michael Siebenbrodt
Издательство: Parkstone International Publishing
Жанр: Иностранные языки
Серия: Temporis
isbn: 978-1-78310-705-6
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The interim solution in the city described earlier ended in October 1926 when the workshops moved into the Bauhaus building. After the opening of the new school building with its attendant publicity in December of the same year, all practical, manual trade subjects could be more strictly systematised and even more impulses from science could be picked up. With the orientation of workshop education towards industrial design, Gropius’s principle of “nature research” was raised to a didactic model. According to it, a thing is defined “by its nature. In order to design it so that it functions – a container, a chair, a house – its nature must first be researched.”[7] This approach was one of the things that created completely new jobs at the end of individual educational paths. The Bauhaus attempted to conceive serial production appropriate for industrial manufacture in the so-called “laboratory workshops”, which were to be offered as high-quality and affordable mass products to a broad class of consumers. A precondition to the purchase of such furniture and objects for daily use, however, was the potential buyer’s declared aesthetic belief in an industrially-based culture. Appropriate PR work was launched which included a stronger use of Bauhaus Ltd, which had been founded in 1925. It was mostly concerned with the marketing process for the products developed in the Bauhaus and with furthering collaboration with industry.
Industry and the beginning of urban construction were thus the focus of interest for the Bauhaus in Dessau. The central German industrial zone in which the Bauhaus had established itself offered more opportunities than ever before to push the combination of art and technology into a “new unity”, and to connect the technical know-how of industrial production with the aesthetic modernism of the Bauhaus designs. But a broader collaboration between the Bauhaus as a “laboratory for industry” (as Gropius put it) and sectors of the industrial economy did not come about. Comprehensive collaboration with the gas device and aircraft manufacturer Junkers, for instance, would have been obvious in many areas, such as dwelling construction, aircraft interior furnishing, advertising and marketing or furniture construction. But the collaboration was reduced to individual projects and partial influencing. The reasons for this may have been less the lack of mutual support and respect than the differing economic interests of the company and the school, as well as the competitive situation which was eventually created by the avant-garde exploratory spirit of both parties.
Masters of the Bauhaus on the roof of the Bauhaus building on the December 4th, 1926, photograph taken using automatic shutter release (l-r: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer)
Planning and Building
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
The Hannes Meyer Era
Swiss architect Hannes Meyer became the new director in 1928. This was preceded by a period of limited donations and a stagnation of good relations between the city of Dessau and its modern institute. The results were dismissals and further limitations imposed on the already very restricted workshops. The precarious situation worsened when the Bauhaus Ltd, despite intense efforts, could not find new customers for its newly-developed products; necessary income was missing. Criticism of the Bauhaus increased. It now came also from representatives of the SPD and there were even tensions with the mayor of Dessau, Hesse. This transferred to parts of the population, whose reservations against the Bauhaus increased as well. Dessau’s lower middle class in particular considered what was carried on in the school as a danger to public order. The Bauhaus was denounced as a breeding ground for “cultural bolshevism” and avoided by many Dessau citizens.
Gropius was constantly busy with battles for the survival of the institution, and when internal problems also increased he gave up. He resigned from his position as director of the Bauhaus and suggested Hannes Meyer as his successor. Gropius stated that he wanted to build more, and considered again, this time somewhere else, the foundation of a “housing construction factory.” The Bauhaus, so he thought, was firmly established and no longer required his leadership. It can be suspected that Gropius saw his goals fulfilled particularly in the pedagogical sector with the establishment of an architecture department and that he was now lacking motivation for further school experiments. Along with Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer also left the school.
Hannes Meyer took office as Bauhaus director on 1st April 1928. In the 1920s, he had been one of the most prominent representatives of a radical scientific functionalism with ideologically left-wing views. On the basis of his Weltanschauung, he reformed the education and workshop production of the СКАЧАТЬ
Walter Gropius, Grundsätze der Bauhausproduktion. In: Neue Erziehung (Jena), 7, 1925, Nr. 6, p.656.
The City of Dessau and Surroundings, Dessau 1926, p.6.