Dessau, May 10, 2013
Constantine set out to re-build Rome in Byzantium (yes, with
the help of Justinian, Theodosius and others.) The comparison may be a little funny but, in a similar vein,
when Walter Gropius moves the Bauhaus to Dessau in the mid 1920s, he seems
to make every effort to bring with him a lot of Weimar.
If you allow me to indulge in the comparison, there is little doubt that the new Bauhaus building in Dessau is
Gropius's Hagia Sophia.
The
studio wing of the building, the one with the little balconies, was know as
"Prellerhaus". Do you
know why? Let me tell you: near the Bauhaus in
Weimar, there was an old house--built in 1870 by the painter Louis Weimaer
Preller--that students and young masters used as dwelling studios, and was
associated with a sense of freewheeling creativity in the school. So Gropius tried to reproduce this environment in the new
building to the point it kept the same name.
At least you can tell that I'm not completely making this
up...
And it's not difficult to imagine that the "Meisterhäuser"
were trying to re-settle the older masters--Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, etc.--in
analogous way to what I imagine was a town-like existence in Weimar (I
wonder if there is a map of Weimar with the locations of all the places where
Bauhaus teachers and students lived?)
But at the risk of pushing my luck, I'd like to stretch the
argument a little further, to the "Kornhaus", the restaurant on Elbe riverbank designed
by Gropius's collaborator Carl Fieger in 1929. It is about a mile and half from the Dessau Bauhaus, roughly the
same distance between the Weimar Bauhaus and the "Ilmschlöesschen", the favorite
restaurant, drinking and partying spot of the early years of the school.
Why not?
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