The sixty years from 1880 to 1940 were the golden age of design, when artists and architects got together to produce integrated work. Movements like Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the Vienna Secession and individuals like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Antonio Gaudi and Frank Lloyd Wright were all within this period. The Bauhaus was too, but it only survived fourteen years, in three locations, with three directors – pursued, persecuted and finally shut down by the Nazi’s. Given that, its influence is extraordinary.
Here are some photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/4Zf9QD5n5P2W6oqD7
Our pilgrimage started where Bauhaus started, in Weimar, a city of just 65,000 people which has historically punched above its weight, with Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche & Liszt amongst its residents, and where the first German democratic constitution, the Weimar Republic, was declared exactly 100 years ago. It’s a charming city, with an eclectic cocktail of buildings, and we started our tour by walking to the place where the movement began, now Bauhaus University, for an excellent guided tour of its two main buildings (by Bauhaus founder and first director Walter Gropius and Henry Van der Velde), by one of its architecture students. Weimar’s other highlight was the Nietzsche Archive – not for the contents, but because it was in a Van der Velde adapted building. Side trips from here took us to the ceramic museum in Burgel, the home of Bauhaus textile weaver Margaretha Reichardt, the cities of Erfurt and Jena and the highlight, Haus Auerbach, a suburban home by Gropius, where we were warmly welcomed by its current owner who has lovingly restored it.
En route to our second base, Chemnitz, two more highlights in Gera – Van der Velde’s beautifully restored Haus Schulenburg and the Museum for Angewandte Kunst, a terrific applied arts collection, most notable for its ceramics and textiles. Our first stop in Chemnitz was the expressionist art at Gunzenhauser Museum, though it turned out to be a 300-work retrospective of one artist, but it was Otto Dix, so the disappointment was somewhat allayed. By the time we got to the vast Chemnitz Public Baths by Fred Otto, we were exhausted, but it took our breathe away. You knew you were in the former East in Chemnitz, which was bigger (250,000 people) and retained a giant statue of the man after whom it was once named, Karl Marx. After saying Hi to Karl and viewing Erich Mendelsohn’s highly original former department store, we headed to the Bauhaus’ second home, Dessau.
Another small city (77,000 people), but more industrial than Weimar, it was the suburbs we headed for, where the Bauhaus impact was huge. From the moment I set eyes on the main building, with it’s iconic vertical name, I was captivated by this mature period in Bauhaus work. In addition to the two school buildings, we visited some ‘masters’ houses’ built for Gropius and his colleagues, his riverside Kornhaus restaurant and the suburban Torten Housing Estate where we could enter three different homes. This was a feast of a day where the the spirit of Bauhaus seemed to join us.
En route to Berlin airport for the flight home, we took in three final buildings – a Gropius Employment Exchange in Dessau with separate doors for each skill / craft (!), his Gaudiesque Einstein Tower on an astrophysics campus high up on a hill overlooking Potsdam and Villa Lemke, a lovely, simple Berlin suburban home by final Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe, who went on to populate Chicago with much bigger but less pleasing buildings.
They achieved a lot in fourteen years; the Nazi’s put an end to the creativity, but the influence of Bauhaus continues to this day, with people like me immersing myself in their work. My art, design & architecture cup runneth over.
Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog 