Sleeping at the Bauhaus
11.01.10
Categories: Events
by Adrian Shaughnessy
Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy were invited to give a talk at the Bauhaus. For a couple of design junkies, the opportunity to visit the cradle of Modernism was too good to miss.
Bauhaus, Dessau
We were invited by a group of Bauhaus students to talk about Unit Editions as part of an annual student-organised conference called Dimensions of Arbeit. We arrived at Tegel Airport, Berlin, early one evening in December, and took a taxi to the Bauhaus in Dessau, about 100 miles south.
It was a long and expensive trip through the black German night. As we zoomed along the autobahn at 90mph, cars seemingly travelling at twice our speed regularly overtook us: I swear I could hear the motorik riffs of Kraftwerk in the sound of the tyres on the road surface.
The centre of Dessau was a surprise – a quaint town with cobbled streets and Hansel and Gretel architecture. In fact, most of its old buildings were destroyed by Allied air raids in World War II and were only restored after German reunification in 1990. In the dark of a December night, Dessau felt like an unlikely place to find the Bauhaus.
We assumed we’d be staying in the German equivalent of a Travelodge. Both Tony and I are used to anonymous hotels on lecturing trips; they all look the same – CNN on the TV, free shortbread and a trouser press not designed by Dieter Rams. So, we were delighted to find out that we were staying in the Bauhaus itself, in rooms reserved for guests.
The rooms were surgically clean and nicely austere in the best Modernist tradition. Not a trouser press in sight, and the light switches, door handles and furniture exuded the expected Bauhausian marriage of form and function. The absence of soft furnishings meant that the slightest sound boomed out like a fire alarm. In the night I was woken by a gun going off outside my room: turned out to be the guy next door putting his key in the lock, but it was loud enough to make me think the ghost of Walter Gropius had tried to shoot someone.
The next day we attended the conference. We had a 12pm slot followed by lunch and then a train journey back to Berlin to catch a 6pm flight to London. But before we left we made sure that we toured the building and visited the bookshop.
A recurring problem with many Modernist structures is that they are now showing their age. A building from say, 1920, is now ninety years old, hardly surprising therefore that many are looking shabby and slightly decrepit. Yet what struck me about the Bauhaus was how fresh it looked. This is because the original Walter Gropius-designed building was pretty much destroyed in bombing raids during the Second World War and the current building was extensively rebuilt.
The original Bauhaus had been founded by Gropius in the politically conservative city of Weimar in 1919. Gropius had been a soldier in World War I. He’d fought valiantly and was seriously injured on three occasions. Returning to civilian life in Berlin, he found a defeated and demoralised Germany. Revolution was fermenting: the workers were flirting with Communism; Socialism was threatening the old political order; and the Kaiser had abdicated.
But Gropius was a man with a vision. He saw the Bauhaus as a way of uniting art and craft in ‘the machine age’ to form a more humane society. In a pamphlet for an exhibition Gropius wrote that his goal was ‘to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.’
In 1925, on a rising tide of German economic growth, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and become a municipally funded design school. Gropius resigned as director in 1928 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe succeeded him in 1930. After the Nazis came to power in Dessau, the Bauhaus was forced to move to Berlin, where, under continuing pressure from the Nazis, it finally dissolved in 1933.
The Bauhaus remained closed until it reopened in 1986. In 1994 it became a public foundation with the objective of preserving, transmitting and studying the legacy of the historic Bauhaus, as well as solving the problems involved in designing today’s environment.
Standing under Herbert Bayer’s famous lettering, it is hard not to feel the historical force exerted by this exhilarating building. So much of what we do as designers – the way we think, the way we function – can be traced to ideologies developed at the Bauhaus.
After the Nazis succeeded in closing it down, its teaching staff went off to form their own versions of the Bauhaus – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, and Max Bill in Ulm – guaranteeing that the spirit of the Dessau school lived on. As one commentator noted: ‘the Bauhaus and Ulm schools exerted unprecedented international influence. It is an accident of history that an essentially German tradition now shapes the global designs of corporations from Philips to Sony.’
Yet perhaps the most lasting contribution made by the Bauhaus is the seeding of the notion that design need not be inferior to art. Over time this dangerous idea – despite the Nazis attempt to stamp it out – has gained acceptance. Without the Bauhaus it might never have gained a foothold.
