Bauhaus

Douglas Barnhard, the owner of the home decor company Sourgrassbuilt, designs and builds birdhouses. Built out of repurposed materials, his designs are inspired by mid-century modernism and pay homage to the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Eichler and the Bauhaus School in Germany yet mix with Barnhard's experience of the rich surf and skate scene in Santa Cruz.

Architectural Adventures, a travel program from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), is the premier travel provider for architecture, art, and photography enthusiasts, as well as intellectually curious travelers. The program offers a variety of small-group tours specializing in the exploration and appreciation of some of the world’s most remarkable architecture, all while enjoying a destination’s culture, food, and traditions.

Living and working in the Schlemmer House in Dessau
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In the 1920’s the Masters’ Houses in Dessau became the epitome of an artist community of the twentieth century. This is where Walter Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and their families lived next door to each other. Here they were joined by their friends and visitors. Artist collectives, artist couples and artist friendships developed here, with everyone working together in the open structure of the model homes located in a park. However, when the Bauhauslers left in 1933 the area became deserted and the work created as a result of the artistic effort was abandoned.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, currently holding its forty-first annual session in the Polish city of Krakow, inscribed twenty new cultural sites on its World Heritage List, including the historic city of Ahmedabad in India, archaeological sites in Cambodia and Brazil, and a “cultural landscape” in South Africa. The Committee also added extensions to two sites already on the list: Strasbourg in France, and the Bauhaus in Germany. On the other hand, the historic center of Vienna was inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger as the Committee examined the state of conservation of one-hundred-and-fifty-four of its listed sites.

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In 1919, at a time in which Germany was still in upheaval over its defeat in the First World War (and compounded by the loss of its monarchy), the Academy of Fine Arts and School of Applied Arts in Weimar, Germany, were combined to form the first Bauhaus. Its stated goal was to erase the separation that had developed between artists and craftsmen, combining the talents of both occupations in order to achieve a unified architectonic feeling which they believed had been lost in the divide. Students of the Bauhaus were to abandon the framework of design standards that had been developed by traditional European schools and experiment with natural materials, abstract forms, and their own intuitions. Although the school’s output was initially Expressionist in nature, by 1922 it had evolved into something more in line with the rising International Style.[1]

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One of the most highly regarded architects of the 20th century, Walter Gropius (18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was one of the founding fathers of Modernism, and the founder of the Bauhaus, the German "School of Building" that embraced elements of art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography in its design, development and production.

Fine arts and commercial photographer Balint Alovits has released Time Machine, his latest photo series documenting Art Deco and Bauhaus staircases throughout Budapest, Hungary.

Shown from the same central perspective, the photographs “create a new dimension by splitting space and time, staying within the visual limits of the project’s concept, while the perception of the architectural details evokes the idea of infinity.”

“I have always liked Art Deco and Bauhaus buildings,” said Alovits. “Whenever I step into one of these caracoles, I feel a certain pulling energy looking up from the bottom or down from the top. I wanted to collect and showcase all the different shapes and colors that these stairways feature.”

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The first piece of the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau will be set into place this weekend as part of the “Bauhaus Building 90th Anniversary” event, one year after Barcelona architects González Hinz Zabala were selected as the winners of a fierce international competition for the commission.

González Hinz Zabala’s open concept, “Black Box” design was originally selected as a joint 1st place winner with a proposal from New York architects Young & Ayata in September of last year, and then awarded the commission for the final design in December following further fine tuning of the design.

Last year Monoskop delighted the architecture and art community by making many of the Bauhaus publications available to freely download. As a perennial fan of all types of architecture communication, I had previously written about the exceptional qualities of Bauhaus-produced books and journals and how these visual teaching tools ultimately influenced more recent, canonical publications. Below we share an edited excerpt from “Architects’ Books: Le Corbusier and The Bauhaus,” a chapter from the larger research project, Redefining The Monograph: The Publications of OMA and Rem Koolhaas.

To access Monoskop’s treasure trove, which includes titles by visionaries such as Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and others, visit Monoskop's Bauhaus archive.

As the Bauhaus operated in a generally experimental and revolutionary status, the information taught was not unified in any particularly accessible form. The Bauhausbücher were produced in order to expose the elements of the Bauhaus education to the original, small student body. These books later proved invaluable when the school was closed by the National Socialist Government in 1933, their contents holding authentic records of Bauhaus education. Merging theory and practice, the books, designed by Moholy-Nagy, are a testament to his creative ideas. He saw traditional forms of information dissemination as supplying information to students without stressing the relevance and relationship to the world in which they were living. His books sought to clarify these relationships through stimulating images and insightful (though at times lengthy and ethereal) text.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has released an online archive of over 3,500 of the museum’s past exhibitions from its founding in 1929 to today. Free and available to the public, the database contains photographs, press releases, checklists, catalogues and lists of featured artists.

The archive contains 660 entries tagged under “architecture” and includes some of architectural history’s greatest exhibitions: the Modern Architecture International Exhibition by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1932; Herbert Bayer’s exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928 in 1938; Thresholds/O.M.A. at MoMA: Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Architecture in 1994; and, most recently, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, which wrapped up its run this past July.

This past weekend, the Bauhaus in Dessau was animated by the Bauhaus Festival. Titled “Circus, Circus – from Black to White,” the event was intended to present all the fun of the fair with a monochrome twist--in opposition to the wild colors usually associated with circuses--and in the words of the Bauhaus was a “kinetic explorations of bodies, objects, media, space and sound.” The event was also an opportunity to tap into the legacy of Bauhaus legend László Moholy-Nagy, whose experiments in film and media blend well with the performative nature of the circus. The event featured a number of performances by artists, while “Cybernetic Circus” by Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and the Initiative Neuer Zirkus turned the grounds of the Bauhaus into an “architectural landscape” of performance modules inspired by Maholy-Nagy. Also featured were installations by students at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle titled “Neo Luna Park.” Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu traveled to the event to capture the festivities, showing their interaction with Walter Gropius’ famous building.

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In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus school in 2019, Harvard Art Museums has released an online catalogue of their 32,000-piece Bauhaus Collection, containing rarely seen drawings and photographs from attendees and instructors of the revolutionary German design school.

The collection features work from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Bertrand Goldberg, Marcel Breuer, and Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius himself, and can be navigated through a search bar and an easy-to-use set of filters, allowing you to categorize work by topic, medium, date or artist.

Replicating the corner of Friedrichstrabe and Kavalierstrabe, Guerra De Rossa Arquitectos and Pedro Livni Arquitecto's entry for the Dessau Bauhaus Museum is organized as an L, suspended above ground to create a passage and meeting space in the park in which it’s situated. The monolithic volume, built in reinforced concrete, acts as a single gesture, emphasizing its weight. Read more about this entry after the break.