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News
from: Germany Tourism, New York
www.germany-tourism.de
(International)
www.cometogermany.com (U.S./Canada)
Source: Victoria Larson
Published: January, 2009
ABOVE: A panoramic view of the
Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für
Gestaltung in Berlin. INSET BELOW: The
sleek, functional lines of a Weimaraner, which could be described as the Bauhaus
of German dog breeds.
Germany celebrates 90 years of Bauhaus design
From sleek glass and steel skyscrapers to the matte black minimalism of
high-end stereo components to the familiar pictograms for men's and ladies'
washrooms -- in thousands, maybe millions of ways, the look and feel of life
today traces back to a single design school in Germany that existed for only 14
years, from 1919 to 1933.
In 2009, Germany celebrates the 90th anniversary of the founding of the
Bauhaus -- literally translated "building school" -- with events and special
exhibitions in the three German cities where the school was founded and
operated: Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.
 Weimar,
where the Bauhaus began, was an unlikely birthplace for such a modern esthetic,
and remains an unlikely - but beautiful -- place to learn about it. To Germans,
Weimar is better known as the late 18th-century home of two of the country's
most important poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. It
was here, in 1919, that the architect Walter Gropius founded an academy to teach
the most up-to-date ideas in painting and printmaking, pottery, industrial
design, interior design, weaving and textiles, typography and graphic design.
Ironically, despite the school's name, architecture was not initially on the
curriculum. Students wishing to learn building design were sent to work in
Gropius's private architecture office.
Nor is there much indication of the Bauhaus in the look of Weimar today. In
fact, the city's Bauhaus Museum, established in 1995, is not in a steel and
glass pavilion but a pink stucco, two- storey building from the 18th century.
Its permanent exhibition includes groundbreaking works by Gropius, color
theorist Johannes Itten, painter Lyonel Feininger and designer Marcel Breuer, as
well as various pieces from the Bauhaus workshops. The core of the myriad of
events celebrating Bauhaus' 90th anniversary in Weimar is the exhibition "The
Birth of the Bauhaus," from April 1 to July 5, at the Bauhaus Museum and other
venues around the town. It will present Weimar as the laboratory that germinated
the ideas later fully developed in Dessau and Berlin, and which subsequently
gained worldwide recognition.
www.thueringen-tourismus.de
In 1925, given the chance to have its own buildings, the Bauhaus moved to the
slightly larger city of Dessau, near the Elbe river. The original
Gropius-designed school building, carefully renovated, survives there, along
with a few of the "masters' houses" -- one of them now a museum honoring the
Dessau composer Kurt Weill -- and a number of other buildings around the town.
The school and houses together have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In Dessau, the focus for 2009 is on the years of the Dessau Bauhaus School:
1925 to 1932. Teacher and student works from every department and
discipline -- including carpentry and metalwork as well as architecture -- will show
the development and working methods of the "College of Design Bauhaus Dessau"
and its emphasis on interdisciplinary learning and production.
In early 1928, Walter Gropius officially resigned as director of the Bauhaus
and eventually moved to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and founded a
major American architecture office, which designed amongst others the MetLife
Building in New York. Two years later the directorship passed to Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe. The school's modernism was too much for Nazi taste and in 1932 the
party moved to have the building demolished. The motion failed, but eight months
later Mies shut down the school in Dessau and moved it, now as a private
institution to Berlin.
Within a year, however, that school was closed by the
authorities and Mies was expelled from Germany. He emigrated to the US, where he
became director of the Illinois Institute of Technology, leaving a lasting
legacy in the U.S. with generations of students and his famous buildings, such
as the Farnsworth Building, and the Seagram Building in New York.
www.germanoriginality.com
While the school's time in Berlin may have been brief, the Bauhaus style has
since thrived in that city as in very few other places. From July 22nd to
October 4th next year, the exhibition "Modell Bauhaus," at the Martin Gropius
Building in Berlin, will present the school's design icons of the early 20th
century in a joint project of Berlin's Bauhaus Archive with the Bauhaus
collections from Weimar and Dessau. www.bauhaus.de.
This exhibition also will be shown at Museum of Modern Art in New York, starting
in October of 2009. http://moma.org
Other major exhibitions in Germany celebrating the Bauhaus Year, besides the
main events in Weimar and Berlin, will be held in several cities throughout
2009:
Bauhaus Exhibition in Frankfurt: Bauhaus 21st - An Ongoing Legacy (March 6th
2009), Deutsches Architekturmuseum. www.dam-online.de
Bauhaus Exhibition in Erfurt: "Controversy about the Bauhaus" (June 7th -
August 2nd, 2009), Kunshalle Erfurt.
www.kunsthalle-erfurt.de/
Bauhaus Exhibition in Erfurt: "Franz Ehrlich" (August 1st - October 11th,
2009), Neues Museum.
www.erfurt-tourismus.de
Bauhaus Exhibition in Jena: "Wassily Kandinsky" (September 6th - November
22nd, 2009), Stadtmuseum Jena.
www.jena.de
Bauhaus Exhibition in Apolda: "Feininger and the Bauhaus" (September
13th - December 20th, 2009), Kunsthaus Apolda Avantgarde.
www.kunsthausapolda.de
For additional information on
the Bauhaus and other Bauhaus sites in Germany along with general travel
information on Germany, please visit
www.cometogermany.com.
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Inset photo: Gualberto Becerra.
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