From fitted kitchens and sleek teapots to glass office towers and housing estates, the legacy of the Bauhaus is all around us. Founded in Weimar in 1919, it was the provincial German art school that changed the world. Teachers included artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were two of its directors. The Bauhaus was the cradle for Modern Movement design despite not having its own architecture course for the first six years and being forced to close in 1933 by the Nazis.
Just opened, as part of a frenzy of centenary celebrations, is the Bauhaus Museum Weimar, a €27 million project led by architect Heike Hanada. Years were spent arguing about which was the right site before the foundations were dug. The result is a massive concrete monolith that aims to straddle the gulf between Classicism and modernity.
The Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is the mouse that roared. Its neoclassical capital of Weimar, all pleasantly plump and smug villas, was the home or workplace for Goethe, Schiller, Bach, Liszt and Nietzsche. Under its hated last grand duke, William Ernest, Art Nouveau was banned from the old town centre. But the aftermath of the First World War brought the Weimar Republic, radical ideas and the establishment of the Bauhaus, with its experimental environment for the men and women of the machine age.
There’s only one truly Bauhaus building in the city (the experimental Haus am Horn) and the rise of the far-Right in the early Twenties meant the Bauhaus was soon chased out of town, — first to Dessau in 1925, where a second museum is now under construction, and thence to Berlin in 1932, where the main Bauhaus archive is also being rebuilt.
Weimar became a Nazi stronghold and the Gauforum, the local party headquarters, was built with slave labour north of the centre. With its colonnades and classical massing, the building was a hub of repression containing a symbolic parade ground once known as Adolf Hitler Platz. The site for the new Bauhaus museum lies next door. Conscious of this legacy so nearby, the job of the museum is not simply to display 1,000 Bauhaus items from a collection of 13,000 but to answer a question posed by Bauhaus director Walter Gropius: how do we want to live together?
For Hanada, this meant using the new building to mediate between the Gauforum and a Twenties people’s park in a nearby wooded hollow. Its language is a synthesis of Modernism and Classicism, with its incised poured concrete façade resembling coursed stone. Insets are lined with LED strips, and instead of stone architraves to doors and windows there are extruded concrete frames to the asymmetrically placed openings. The huge cube-shaped structure is built into a slope, wth a glazed café terrace to the park at its lower level. It now forms part of a cultural quarter that includes the refurbished Neues Museum and a conference centre, as well as a new exhibition in the Gauforum exploring the history of forced labour.
“The biggest question was to define a new identity for the area with only one new building,” says Hanada. “To define space and heal a fragmented situation. In spite of the negative experience of Fascism, we as architects should start to rethink our relationship to classical architecture and monumentality. In Germany we have been frightened to talk about monumentality because it has a negative spirit. But it has been a disaster for urban development — we need a method to place public buildings, to define a hierarchy of what is important and what’s not.”
Classicism developed over centuries, she argues, but has been “thrown away” because of its associations as the house style of totalitarianism. She under-standably sniffs at an alternative simplistic formulation that glass = transparency = democracy.
Inside the new museum, however, it is largely Modernism that holds sway across five floors (café, foyer, and three exhibition and workshop levels) which are linked by a series of staircases. These run in slots through double-height spaces overlooked by internal windows and balconies.
The palette is white painted walls, grey or cream terrazzo floors, with slender concrete beams above. The volumes are huge compared with the displays they contain: Hanada says she was inspired by the industrial spaces and robust materials favoured by contemporary art museums such as Tate Modern. She’s also a fan of the London practice Caruso St John, and this building brings to mind some aspects of its design for the New Art Gallery Walsall. But the Weimar project has none of the Walsall building’s domestic warmth and gentleness. Where concrete frames to doors are absent, junctions are harsh. And the minimum of external windows means that the white interior looks grey and generic in the dim light.
Despite the splendid exhibits of furniture, textiles and ceramics, the interior falls flat, conjuring the Bauhaus at its dour worst rather than its colourful best. Practicalities such as lifts and loos are hopelessly inadequate.
At the museum’s opening press conference officials and politicians made veiled references to the rise of the intolerant Right, speaking of healing rifts. The old Bauhaus display space in a nearby square is, for instance, in the midst of being transformed into a centre for democratic debate — with glazed walls, of course, serving that tired transparency metaphor.
Externally, the new museum cleverly creates a series of open spaces between itself and adjacent buildings. But in seeking to heal the rift between Modernism and Classicism it serves to rehabilitate the ponderous architectural language of the Gauforum’s stolid state incarnation of the Classical rather than deny it. As a totality, the museum’s form has uncomfortable echoes of the coursed stone of the Gauforum’s bell tower — it has menace rather than the charm of Weimar’s otherwise decorous take on Classicism.
On the top floor of the museum is a display of angled walls dedicated to the Bauhaus’s second director, Hannes Meyer. Projected film engages visitors with his ideas, which are set out in a series of quotes, the opening offering being that “the community prevails over the individual”. It’s chilling.
In the distance through a window can be seen the hillside memorial to those who died in Buchenwald concentration camp. It’s a deliberate framing, and serves as a useful reminder of one outcome of Meyer’s kind of thinking. But the window is at the head of a tremendous staircase that descends precipitously a full four floors through a towering narrow void. There’s a fascistic resonance to the awe this arrangement inspires — it overwhelms.
Unhappily, the Bauhaus Museum in its forcefulness projects the opposite of the sincere efforts behind its design. Healing faultlines using this kind of hybrid architectural language — and Hanada has succeed on her own terms in creating that fusion — also means an accommodation with something that just shouldn’t be accommodated.
germany.travel. Robert Bevan travelled as a guest of Visit Germany
