In March 2025, the actor Adrian Brody rose to the stage to collect his Academy Award for playing the role of László Toth in the acclaimed film, The Brutalist. The film is about a Bauhaus-educated architect who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s for the United States. Whilst the story is fictional, it reflects the lives of several émigré architects who left Central Europe in search of better working and intellectual conditions. These included the first three directors of Bauhaus, the renowned German school of design established in 1919. The first and third directors of the school, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe respectively, ended up in the US where their careers in teaching and building both flourished. Lesser known is the second director, Hannes Meyer, who took a different path from his colleagues.
Meyer was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1889. He was the son of an architect and he grew up in an environment of Marxist ideas which would influence his views and career for his entire working life. He initially trained as a mason and construction draughtsman before undertaking construction courses, including one in Bath, England, and a placement in an architectural office in Berlin. As an architect, he entered competitions with his partner Hans Wittwer. The Petersschule, a primary school for women in Basel, was an early success story that drew attention to their work. It was commended for its bright, daylit interiors and its elevated playground which created a public space below. The 1927 design for the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva set the scene for the architectural pedagogy at the Bauhaus, even though it had not won.
In early 1927, Meyer was invited by Walter Gropius to join Bauhaus, where he headed the newly formed architecture department. Not much later, in 1928, he was selected as Gropius' successor as director of the Bauhaus, a role he would fill for only two years. For both Gropius and Meyer, design was a rational, organizational process. However, Meyer was critical of artistic intuition and wanted to curtail the influence of the architect as an individual. He preferred design to be led by theory. He separated the sciences from the arts, creating new subjects in technology, natural sciences, humanities, and workshops on industry and social ideals. He was of the view that Bauhaus had abandoned its principle of designing 'for people' and wanted its reinstatement.
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Spotlight: Walter GropiusHannes Meyer's Marxist leanings also influenced his managerial tendencies, where he promoted cooperative methods of organizing workshops. When designing one of his notable projects with Hans Wittwer while director at the Bauhaus, the ADGB Trade Union School near Berlin, he arranged vertical brigades that united students from various years in the project's implementation. Meyer's ideology and his sympathy for communist student groups put him on a collision path with the school and the local authority, including Gropius himself, at a time when Germany was becoming increasingly nationalist. He was forced out of Bauhaus in 1930.
In the same year, Meyer emigrated with a group of former Bauhaus students, not to the United States like Gropius or van der Rohe, but to the Soviet Union. He taught in Moscow and the following year also became an advisor to the Russian Institute for Urban and Investment Development, among other roles. He designed university buildings, expansions of Moscow, and various settlements. His stay in the Soviet Union was a significant time in his political thought and activity.
When the Stalinist regime began to affect the work of Meyer and other Bauhaus colleagues, he decided to return to his native Switzerland in 1936. There, he completed one project, the cooperative children's home in Mümliswil. This was an institution set up by Dr Bernhard Jaeggi, a friend of Hannes Meyer, where physically weakened children could be cared for. Its construction was meant to boost local construction in the poor economic conditions of the time and hence was constructed mostly of local materials. Meyer used his own experience of having spent time in an orphanage to inform the design, such as allowing for individual private spaces for the children.
In 1939, the year war broke out in Europe, Meyer would migrate once more. This time, he would travel to Mexico where he was appointed as the director of the Institute for Urban Development and Planning at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City. Politics would soon disrupt his work again, and he was dismissed from the post in 1941 with the change in government. His time in Mexico saw him design significant projects such as Lomas de Becerra, a housing scheme for 12,500 inhabitants following the architect's principles of 'elastic planning' that he developed when designing Soviet urban schemes. This was characterized by a perimeter of infrastructure and an axial green corridor with schools, markets, and social functions. Hannes Meyer's time in Mexico lasted nine years, although none of his designs were built. As well as teaching, he contributed significantly to art groups including the Taller de Grafica Popular (TGP).
In 1949 he returned to Europe with ambitions of contributing to postwar reconstruction which were unrealized. He devoted his time to theoretical work but had no more built works before he died in southern Switzerland in 1954. Meyer's life was primarily influenced by his political convictions. Although relatively few, his built works were a physical manifestation of his views and were no less pioneering in the early Modern Movement than those of his peers. Most significant and somewhat underappreciated was his influence on architectural education at the Bauhaus at its very inception.
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