When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925 Lord Mayor Fritz Hesse promised the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, the necessary financing not only for a new school building, but also for a residential complex for the Bauhaus’s teachers, known as masters since the Weimar days. Just a year later the Bauhaus building and the Master’s Houses were finished and became symbols of a revolution in design and education. To this day, they are the epitome of “white modernism“ worldwide.
The complex of Master’s Houses is one of the most impressive examples of Bauhaus modernism in Germany, and became a byword for the twentieth century artists’ colony. Pioneering works of classical modernist art were created in the cubic homes and ateliers. The complex was moreover seen as a kind of experimental workshop for the Bauhaus idea of a new way of living. With Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, all three directors of the Bauhaus lived right next to Bauhaus masters László Moholy-Nagy,Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer,Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Later, they were joined by Anni and Josef Albers, Gertrud and Alfred Arndt, Gunta Stölzl and Lou and Hinnerk Scheper.
With the collapse of the Weimar Republic – the end of the first democracy on German soil – the Bauhaus masters and students left their place of work in Dessau. After a short period in Berlin, the Bauhaus succumbed to the pressures exerted by the National Socialists and closed in 1933. Many of the Bauhauslers had to emigrate and were never to return to Germany. The Nazis saw the now empty Master’s Houses as “un-German” and had them redeveloped. When Dessau was bombed in 1945, Gropius House and the Moholy-Nagy half of a Masters’ House were also reduced to rubble. The remaining houses survived the GDR era as rental properties used by third parties, but no evidence remained of the original Bauhaus architecture, which had been deliberately and promptly destroyed.
With the reunification of Germany, the fortunes of the complex changed. Thanks to financially strong investors, the municipality of Dessau was in a position to renovate the surviving Feininger, Kandinsky/Klee and Muche/Schlemmer houses in 1994, 2000 and 2001 respectively. The complex of Master’s Houses recovered its identity, but remained nonetheless incomplete. For a number of years there was a controversial debate about whether and how the destroyed houses might be rebuilt. The turning point came in 2001: In consultation with the leading British architect David Chipperfield and other experts, a decision was made to rebuild the Gropius and Moholy-Nagy Master’s Houses, not as replicas of the originals, but utilising the means of contemporary architecture. As a result, they have now been rebuilt as innovative reductions and abstractions of the original buildings. Inside the buildings, artist Olaf Nicolai has created an installation that re-enacts the original dialogue between Gropius’s architecture and the Bauhaus artists. Instead of colour, light! The kiosk designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which protrudes from the wall surrounding the complex, is also back in its original place.
The reparation of the complex of Master’s Houses is a project of the municipality of Dessau-Roßlau, supported and supervised by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in the framework of their mission to conserve the legacy of the Bauhaus.
The topping-out ceremony for the rebuild of Gropius House was held in December 2012; the opening took place on 16 May 2014.
Architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez built the new Gropius and Moholy-Nagy Master’s Houses
In actual fact, we know the Director’s House and the Moholy-Nagy House only from historical documents: drawings, plans, models and photos. In spring 2010 the Berlin-based architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez delivered a convincing concept that comes to grips with memories. Rather than reconstruct the Bauhaus icons, they prioritised an interpretation, utilising the means of contemporary architecture.
For the architects, who come from Italy and Argentina, reconstruction was not an option, because it would have not only obscured the differences of the architectural origins, but also would – like every copy – query the legitimacy of the originals. The concept of imprecision as an inevitable component of memory was elevated to an architectonic principle. Their design aims to meet the requirement of repair by recreating the shell of the earlier buildings. The visitor will recognise all this in the choice of materials and the drastic reduction of details.
A shell of poured concrete with embedded windows surrounds a sculptural “artefact” that gives a fragmented rendition of the original internal organisation of the buildings. This reduction of the building to two elements allows for multilayered interpretations. It is to be understood as an incentive to complete the picture of the building in one’s own mind and, at the same time, creates an independent composition, a tension between solid shell and subtle installation.
On Olaf Nicolai’s artistic interior configuration of the new Master’s Houses in Dessau
The dialectic of tradition and renewal inherent to the work of architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez is also taken up in the work “La pigment de lumière” (The colour of light) by the artist Olaf Nicolai, who designed the so-called artefacts inside the new Master’s Houses. One of Germany’s most successful artists on the international scene, Nicolai divides the structure into different segments, thereby creating an abstract image composed of rectangles and squares.
The “grid” of the given structure forms the starting point; segments within this are defined, thus establishing a composition that brings to mind a constructive-abstract image made up of rectangles and squares of different sizes, these to be enhanced by occasional diagonal connections.
This arrangement is no arbitrary projection; it is dictated by the structural specifications of the building. These lines define segments, which, however, are not defined by colour, ornamentation or structures; rather, it is the surface itself which is worked by hand to create a diverse range of render and spackle finishes. That is to say: the visual segmentation and the technical realisation evolve from the building and the conditions of its realisation. Each segment is given its own surface, which, thanks to the incident light and the depth of the room, yields an extremely subtle interplay of monochrome surfaces.
The artefacts gain a “skin” that accentuates them clearly, yet does not dominate in and of itself. Rendered and spackled surfaces take on a variety of guises. The alternation of the white surfaces, the boundaries of which blend from one to the next, and the different angles of refraction that the differently finished surfaces present, create a subtle interplay of refraction and shadow effects. Nicolai developed his work based on the theories of László Moholy-Nagy, who dealt intensively with the phenomenon of light and its pigments. “La pigment de lumière” was generously supported by the Kunststiftung Sachsen-Anhalt, Stiftung Meisterhäuser Dessau and Lotto-Toto GmbH Sachsen-Anhalt.