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Posts tagged ‘Bauhaus 100’

Laubenganghäuser, Siedlung Törten, Bauhaussiedlung Dessau–Törten, Törten, Dessau Törten, Dessau-Süd, Bauhaus, Bauhaus100, Dessau, Dessau-Rosslau, Saxony-Anhalt, Sachsen-Anhalt, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: Dessau Balcony-Access Apartments (Bauhaus100)

Part 4 of 4, Dessau Törten Estate.

2019 marks the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus. The Bauhaus art school began life first in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, moved to Dessau between 1925 and 1932, and ended in Berlin from 1932 and 1933 before the Nazis forced the school to close for good.

After Hannes Meyer took over as Bauhaus Director in 1928 after Walter Gropius’ departure, Meyer recognized the need for “verticality” to address the continuing housing shortage in Dessau. Meyer and the staff within Bauhaus’ architectural department quickly set out to design and construct Laubenganghäuser apartment buildings. The results in 1930 were five multiple-storey brick buildings, projected stairwells, open communal balcony on each floor, standard-sized apartments with standardized furnishings and large windows. The picture shows a Laubenganghaus at address Peterholzstrasse 40, which looks pretty much the same now as it did decades ago. The Laubenganghäuser were added in 2017 as an extension to the 1996 listing for Dessau Bauhaus as UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Thanks to IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus and the city of Dessau-Rosslau for their patronage and access to facilities, and the City-Pension Dessau-Rosslau for their hospitality. IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus supported my visit to the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt from 25 October to 3 November 2016 inclusive. I made the photo above on 28 October 2016 with a Canon EOS6D and the following settings: 1/500-sec, f/8, ISO1000, and 24mm focal length. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins.com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-dHw.

Konsumgebäude, Siedlung Törten, Bauhaussiedlung Dessau–Törten, Törten, Dessau Törten, Dessau-Süd, Bauhaus, Bauhaus100, Dessau, Dessau-Rosslau, Saxony-Anhalt, Sachsen-Anhalt, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: Dessau Konsum Building (Törten Estate)

Part 3 of 4, Dessau modernism in architecture: Törten Estate.

2019 marks the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus. The Bauhaus art school began life first in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, moved to Dessau between 1925 and 1932, and ended in Berlin from 1932 and 1933 before the Nazis forced the school to close for good.

In 1926, the city of Dessau had commissioned Martin Gropius to design and build some 300 housing units in Törten, a village in the city’s southern extent, to relieve the housing shortage. The construction was not a Bauhaus project, but included materials and construction methods for the project to be built as quickly and cheaply as possible. The five-storey Konsumgebäude (Konsum Building) acted not only as “high rise” landmark for the horizontally aligned terrace houses in the housing estate, but acted also as community centre which included a food cooperative, a butcher’s shop, café, and laundry. The ground floor now hosts an information centre with descriptions regarding the Törten Housing Estate (which is not included in Dessau’s UNESCO World Heritage Site).

Thanks to IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus and the city of Dessau-Rosslau for their patronage and access to facilities, and the City-Pension Dessau-Rosslau for their hospitality. IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus supported my visit to the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt from 25 October to 3 November 2016 inclusive. I made the photo above on 28 October 2016 with a Canon EOS6D and the following settings: 1/500-sec, f/8, ISO1000, and 35mm focal length. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins.com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-dH5.

Meisterhäuster, Gropiushaus, Masters Houses, Gropius House, Bauhaus, Bauhaus100, Dessau, Dessau-Rosslau, Saxony-Anhalt, Sachsen-Anhalt, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: Dessau Masters’ Houses (Bauhaus100)

Part 2 of 4, Dessau Bauhaus.

2019 marks the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus. The Bauhaus art school began life first in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, moved to Dessau between 1925 and 1932, and ended in Berlin from 1932 and 1933 before the Nazis forced the school to close for good.

About 500 metres north from the Bauhaus headquarters building are four structures Martin Gropius designed for the Bauhaus Masters: a single family house and three duplex houses. UNESCO inscribed the Masters’ Houses and the Bauhaus headquarters building as part of a single Bauhaus World Heritage Site in 1996.

Thanks to IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus and the city of Dessau-Rosslau for their patronage and access to facilities, and the City-Pension Dessau-Rosslau for their hospitality. IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus supported my visit to the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt from 25 October to 3 November 2016 inclusive. I made the photo above on 28 October 2016 with a Canon EOS6D and the following settings: 1/250-sec, f/5, ISO1000, and 24mm focal length. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins.com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-dGW.

Bauhaus headquarters, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Bauhaus, Bauhaus 100, Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: Dessau Bauhaus Building (Bauhaus100)

Part 1 of 4, Dessau Bauhaus.

2019 marks the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus. The Bauhaus art school began life first in Weimar between 1919 and 1925, moved to Dessau between 1925 and 1932, and ended in Berlin from 1932 and 1933 before the Nazis forced the school to close for good.

Designed by Martin Gropius, the Bauhaus headquarters building opened in Dessau in 1926. For the building’s steel and glass construction, it’s considered a follow-on of Gropius’ design of the Fagus shoe-last factory complex (1911) in Alfeld. UNESCO inscribed the Bauhaus headquarters building and the Masters’ Houses (down the street) as part of a single Bauhaus World Heritage Site in 1996.

Thanks to IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus and the city of Dessau-Rosslau for their patronage and access to facilities, and the City-Pension Dessau-Rosslau for their hospitality. IMG- and Sachsen-Anhalt-Tourismus supported my visit to the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt from 25 October to 3 November 2016 inclusive. I made the photo above on 28 October 2016 with a Canon EOS6D and the following settings: 1/500-sec, f/5, ISO1000, and 32mm focal length. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins.com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-dGC.

Before Bauhaus: Alfeld Fagus Factory, UNESCO WHS

Before Bauhaus found its first footing in Weimar, there was in the town of Alfeld in central Germany the Fagus-Werk factory building.

The Fagus factory building is looked upon as the first building in the world for the modern architectural age, and is the predecessor to the elegant 1926 Bauhaus headquarters building in Dessau. Fagus company founder Karl Benscheidt commissioned architect and future Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, to create and build a shoe-making factory as an artistic project. Gropius and his collaborator Adolf Meyer stuck with working floor-plans by architect Eduard Werner, and set their sights on new exterior and interior designs. Completed in 1911, the factory’s office building set a new standard for 20th-century industrial architecture with steel and glass construction and tall unsupported windows at the corners of the building.

“Fagus” is Latin for “beech tree”, and shoemaking began with shoe lasts or moulds constructed from beech wood, which were sold and distributed around the world to other companies for the productions of shoes. In the 1920s, Benscheidt developed the turning precision-lathe speeding up production, prompting growth and expansion and elevating the company to world’s top producer of shoe lasts. Today, the building is still a working factory: Fagus creates plastic lasts milled by automated machinery to precise specifications for specific designs by shoe companies. Also on-site is GreCon which produces systems for fire-detection and fire-extinguishing in industrial settings. The Fagus factory building was recognized as “unique living monument” and inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage Site (Welterbe) in 2011.

With a population of over 20-thousand people, Alfeld is located in the German federal state of Lower Saxony. The town’s reach by train is 30-minutes from Hannover or 40-minutes from Göttingen, after which is a short 5- to 10-minute walk from Alfeld(Leine)1 train station to the entrance of the Fagus/GreCon complex. Visitors can walk around the working factory site, stop at the World Heritage Site Visitor Centre, sit in the neighbouring café for coffee or tea, and visit the museum dedicated to the building’s origins, the building’s century-long history of shoe-making, and a general history of footwear.

Walter Gropius and others would move to Weimar to establish a centre of art, design, thought, and attitude for Bauhaus in 1919, eight years after inauguration of the Fagus-Werk.

Die Baukunst soll ein Spiegel des Lebens und der Zeit sein.
(Architecture should be a mirror to life and its time.)

– Walter Gropius.

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Dessau: The Bauhaus Building, UNESCO WHS

21st-century Modernity, from 1919 on

The chair or couch on which you sit.
The table on which you’re resting your mobile or pad.
The desk on which your laptop or desktop resides.
The light fixture on your desk or above your head.
The windows in your room, your house, or in the cafĂ© where you’re reading this.

The “universal” idea of living in a house or apartment with the furnishings we all take for granted from bathroom to bedroom and kitchen to living room is a relatively young idea by historical standards. It’s easy to imagine a time where only the rich upper-class could afford and were allowed to have and live in heated furnished residences, and the poor lower-class lived in unheated homes under damp dirty squalid conditions. Past designs with its heavy stone, porcelain, and ornate decorative components gave way to steel, glass, lightness of space, to favouring function over form. Simpler designs were meant to provide universal access: to the home, and to the essentials which furnished the home.

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Wittenberger Marktplatz, Rathaus, Lutherdenkmal, Stadtkirche Sankt Marien, Marktplatz, Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, Deutschland, UNESCO, World Heritage Site, Welterbe, Weltkulturerbe, fotoeins.com

The Saxony-Anhalt 5: Luther & Bauhaus

(October 2016.)

As motivation to trace Martin Luther’s footsteps for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017 and to learn more about the impact of the Bauhaus art and design movement for the centenary in 2019, I embarked on a press-trip in the autumn 2016 to the German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt.

(( The description of this trip would be a continuation of a consecutive annual streak going back to 2001. I’ve set foot inside Germany at least once every year since 2001. I’d already claimed another consecutive year with a short stint at “home” in the HD earlier in the spring, but autumn in-country* solidly confirmed a 16th consecutive year in the country. ))

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Uni-Hauptgebäude, Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, Thüringen, Germany, UNESCO World Heritage, Weltkulturerbe, fotoeins.com

Weimar Bauhaus Old & New, UNESCO WHS

There’s a clear transition in time where architecture and design took a step from behind closed doors for the sole purview of the rich and royal and out into the open for public and general consumption. It’s no surprise the years from the end of the 19th-century into the 20th-century marked big changes, with Art Nouveau at the time as part of the Secession movement. Throughout Europe, rebellion and revolution were in the air, economically, politically, and culturally.

The Bauhaus movement also helped initiate a conversation, creating and fostering a relationship between industry’s machinery and artistic or cultural creativity. Bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1919, before moving to Dessau and Berlin. The rise of the National Socialists deemed Bauhaus “degenerate” and did all they could to eliminate a movement and her people deemed counter to National Socialist policy. With Bauhaus’ forced closure in 1933 by the Nazis, a number of practitioners escaped Germany to other parts of the world, including the United States and Argentina.

For their deep and wide-ranging influence on 20th-century art, architecture, and design, an incomplete list of names includes Martin Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Herbert Bayer, Irene Bayer (née Hecht), Karla Grosch, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, etc. In particular, László Moholy-Nagy would move to Chicago in the United States and established in 1937 the New Bauhaus which became the Institute of Design in 1944.

Tucked away on a university campus a few minutes south of the Weimar city centre, two important building lie across from each other: the Saxony Academy of Art1 building and the Grand Ducal Saxony School of Arts and Crafts (College of Applied Arts)2. The former is now the main building for the present-day Bauhaus University, and the latter now houses Bauhaus University’s Faculty of Design. In 1996, these two buildings formed a part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) listing and designation for Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau.

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Central staircase, main building, Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, Germany, UNESCO World Heritage Site, UNESCO Weltkulturerbe, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday: Weimar, Bauhaus, and UNESCO

Built in 1911 by Dutch architect Henry van de Velde as the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, the present-day main building of the Bauhaus University represents the beginning of the Bauhaus movement here in 1919. The photo above highlights the simple elegance of the central spiraling staircase in what is also known as the van-de-Velde building. One key highlight about the “Bauhaus movement” was a shift from decorative elements to functional forms “inside and outside.” For their important contributions to modern architecture and design, UNESCO awarded World Heritage Site status to the Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau in 1996.

Thanks to Weimar Tourism, Thüringen Tourismus, Germany National Tourism Board for access to places and activities in the city; and to Dorint Hotel am Goethepark for a comfortable and welcoming stay. I made this photo above on 30 April 2015 with the Canon 6D, EF 24-105 L IS zoom-lens, and the following settings: 1/250s, f/4, ISO500, and 32mm focal length. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotopress at fotoeins.com as http://wp.me/p1BIdT-6No.

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