What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz

Author:Will Gompertz [Gompertz, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-09-28T05:00:00+00:00

Fig. 18. Marcel Breuer, B3 Chair/Wassily, 1925

And then, at last, a change of fortune: for the Bauhaus and for Germany. The Americans came up trumps and lent the German government enough money to get their country back on its feet. Unemployment went down; commercial activity went up. Confidence returned, and industrial centers across the country approached Gropius offering the Bauhaus a fresh start in their district. These ambitious towns and cities wanted to encourage new businesses to their area but needed to be able to demonstrate that they had a ready pool of skilled staff and modern housing available. The Bauhaus and Walter Gropius’s architectural practice could provide both. In 1925 the Masters and students of the world’s most famous school of design set up shop in the town of Dessau, a little way north of Weimar.

And to welcome them there Walter Gropius had designed one of the great works of modernist architecture: a veritable Bauhaus. The complex of workshops, students’ accommodation, theaters, common areas and Masters’ houses was opened in December 1926 (see Fig. 19). It was the realization of Gropius’s dream for his institution: a genuine Gesamtkunstwerk created by the staff and students of the school. The fittings, furniture, signage, murals and buildings were all part of one coherent vision. The main building for teaching boasted a huge rect­angular glazed façade, an epic glass curtain wall sandwiched between two thin horizontal lines of white concrete: one a raised plinth, the other a flat-topped pediment. Seen from above, the interconnecting Dessau Bauhaus buildings look like a Mondrian painting: an asymmetrical grid of vertical and horizontal lines that produce a balanced composition of rectangles.

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