Minimalist reinterpretation of the Walter Gropius Houses by BFM

The project, by the architect Bruno Fioretti Marquez, is featured as a Bauhaus reinterpretation not reconstructed in Dessau after WW2. When the Bauhaus school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Walter Gropius finally had the chance to build. Funded by the Dessau-based aircraft manufacturer Hugo Junkers, the famous Bauhaus building and, a few hundred metres away, the four “Meisterhäuser” (Masters’ Houses) for the Bauhaus’ lecturers and their families, were built within a year. The artistic power which formed the basis for the Bauhaus myth, that persists even today, is underlined when one looks at the names of these lecturers: Gropius – who moved into the “Director’s house”, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

Both the main building and the Masters’ Houses were built as demonstrations of “modern living”: composed of clear, cubic forms with large windows, their simple, spare aesthetic carried through from their façades to their door handles, shelves, chairs, kitchens and laundry devices. Gropius and his wife Ise, who would actually only live in their house for two years, were continuously demonstrating to visitors and guests the efficiency and hygiene that this new way of living was designed .

Yet the ensemble of these four houses also demonstrates how hierarchical an institution the Bauhaus still was. While the six masters each had a fairly modest semi-detached house, Bauhaus Director Gropius built himself a much larger house, akin to a villa. It was to include servants’ rooms as well as a garage – for his official car in which he was driven around by a chauffeur. The semi-detached houses by contrast offered their inhabitants basic accommodation. And while they were sited together amongst a small existing forest, the director’s villa had a massive two metre-high wall encircling it, carving out a private garden.

Before the Bauhaus Dessau was closed by the NSDAP in 1932, the political struggles of the time had already resulted in the Gropius House hosting three different directors as inhabitants: for Gropius resigned in 1928, Hannes Meyer took over but just for two years, and he was followed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930. For reasons largely unknown, Mies added a little kiosk for non-alcoholic drinks into Gropius’ fortress-like wall where it faced onto the city – perhaps to make a slightly more welcoming gesture to locals other than just brute blankness.

On 7 March 1945, most of Dessau’s inner city was destroyed by an air raid. Gropius’ villa and the neighbouring home of the Moholy-Nagys were severely damaged, and while House Moholy-Nagy (actually half a house) was torn down completely, the basement of the Gropius House survived.

In the course of the reappraisal of the Bauhaus’ heritage in Dessau, intense discussions on the lost one-and-a-half Masters’ Houses suddenly exploded. An initial architecture competition was held and ended without satisfying result, fuelling the discussions even more. The question arose if perhaps there was a third way between keeping the contradictory elements of the site as witness to a contradictory past, or reconstructing Gropius’ original as if nothing had happened. In a new competition, it were Berlin-based Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects who came up with a convincing, yet heavily theoretical, scheme that answered this question.

Their almost philosophical concept referred to the work of artists and writers like Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Jorge Luis Borges, with their ideas cuing off themes of human memory and imagination: “Our memory lives off blurriness and imprecision”, said architect José Gutierrez Marquez at the opening in Dessau. Their winning scheme, now completed but not yet fitted out, is an experiment questioning what a reconstruction is or could be.

The two reconstructed houses were opened by German President Joachim Gauck this month and the buildings will now be used to host events and exhibitions by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and a cultural organisation called the Kurt-Weill Zentrum.