The headquarter of the Bauhaus

The building is itself the manifesto of the ideology of the movement. The idea is to pass through the building, that is a sort of horizontal skyscraper. It has an articulated form made of functional cores: dormitory, classrooms, food hall/theatre, a bridge, offices of the professors and another school (the technical one). The two entities of technical and artistic school are in this way united into a single complex.

The first area when entering is the vestibulum. On the right we access the laboratories, extending from the ground floor to the third level.

This kind of open/centripetal form without centrality is the transposition of the activities in the complex.

The facade is characterized by a curtain wall contrasting the concrete.

The corner is freed from tectonic elements that are kept inside the glass curtain. This makes the bridge intelligible also across the building.

Toward the city there is the dormitory with a different facade from the rest of the complex, less transparent and characterized by balconies. All the lights, furniture and components were designed by students/professors of the Bauhaus.

The theatre was another place of maturation for the formal research. The attempt is here to represent the movement and the rhythm of the music. All the books by architects and urban designers of this period report the concept of rhythm: the rhythm of nature and the one of modernity need to find a meeting point. The rhythm of the theatre is produced by the rhythm of the movement of his protagonists, that create the space.

Oskar Schlemmer, triadic ballet, 1927

The three protagonists break the rhythm of the individuality. It is a non-balancing movement, reflected into a non-balanced space.

Here we see also the theme of the costumes. There is the need of modernizing a traditional practice through new costumes and scenography.

Dessau Torten

Another architecture, to be later contextualized, is the Zig und Torten?? , based on the idea of creating a neighbourhood starting from the prefabricated products. It is a worker neighbourhood with no more than 60 apartments with a central communal worker house, where Meyer and Gropius tried to combine the prefabricated elements (beams and surfaces) into a design.

How can we conceive an architecture while considering the design of the city, and the building possibility, in a period when the prefabricated elements are present on the market? Industrial architects are trying to finds a synthesis among these themes.

The elements are produced in factories, all the furniture, windows, frames…

The Bauhaus of Meyer

In 1928 Gropius leaves the school, and gives start to a dispute about his successor that happened to be Meyer. He was very active in the field of social housing, and the author of a change in the didactic approach. The extreme practices of teaching are softened, and the new idea is to transform the architectural part of the school as the real protagonist. Meyer designs a series of building, also in relationship with nature, avoiding the monolithic idea of a non-organic architecture. An example is the School of the General German Trade Union Federation, Bernau, Berlin. The building has to reflect the relationship interior/exterior, using the most different materials.

Talking about experimental and utopian shift of the school we need to mention the radical architect Ludwig Hilberseimer. He is a rhetorician, who dedicated his entire life to teaching, first in theory in the Bauhaus and later in the USA, with the most advanced criticism to the capitalistic state, underlining how the speed brought to anonymity, monotony, etc. His designs reach different levels and typologies: cities for workers that start from a cell, qualifying the most liveable space possible, developing through multiplication into an isotropic city based on prefabrication and standardization.

Last phase: Mies van der Rohe

The last protagonist of the Bauhaus is Mies Van der Rohe, who brought the movement to the last phase, and the last city. In Berlin the school is transformed into an actual school of architecture and a mies-like institution, in the problematic context of Germany in the late 20s. The Nazi won the elections, and the Nazi groups invaded the school of Dessau operating the fascist methodology of frightening the students.

In 1933 the school closes, having different outcomes. First of all, the migration of the protagonists of the European art and architecture, mainly to the UK and USA. Mies himself moved to the USA, where he will become a teacher at the MIT institute. This migration of intellectuals in general characterizes the phenomenon of modernity. The Bauhaus will have a huge impact on the American and international culture. It was also important for the foundation of the modern architectural school in the USA.

- Moholy-nagy is another important protagonist of this period, painter and photographer.

- Marcel Breuer also moves to USA, where he experiments mainly with reinforce concrete.

- Josef Albers, moving to the USA, contributes to an exceptional moment in the history of American modernism.

- Finally, John Cage recreates the artistic theatral culture of America experimenting on abstraction, that affects also the fields dance and music.