Model Houses for the Modern Age

"the organism of a house arises from the course of the processes that play out in it. … the building is not there for its own sake, it arises solely from the essence of building, from the function it is to fulfil.”

Gropius (the man with the cigarette) put this central idea into practice when in 1925-26 he built the Masters’ Houses ensemble for himself and his Masters:

Asymmetrical cubic bodies made of concrete, steel and lots of glass. With flat roofs, large studios with floor to ceiling windows and a terrace running all the way around.

One exemplary single villa he designed for himself as Director and three semi-detached houses for his Bauhaus masters. The white buildings are lined up in a row like modern sculptures.

In the colony in the Kiefernwald the artists lived next door to each other as close neighbours. Wassily Kandinsky (on the right with his wife Nina) next to Paul Klee. Georg Muche (on the left with his wife El) next to Oskar Schlemmer. László Moholy-Nagy next to Lyonel Feininger.

The painter Lyonel Feininger (3rd from right) was one of the first artists to be brought to the Bauhaus as a Master by Walter Gropius in 1919. His name is inseparably associated with the Bauhaus Manifesto, with his woodcut of a cathedral ornamenting its title page.

Born in America, he became known as a caricaturist for German and American newspapers and for his expressionist drawings.

In Weimar Feininger was head of the graphic print workshops. He helped his students to find themselves artistically and was immensely popular as a teacher. But he didn’t want to make the move to Dessau, saying that the path from being a school of design to a production shop for industry was …

… "terrible and the end of all art”, as he complained in a letter to his wife Julia. Finally Gropius managed to persuade him to stay on as a Master, but without any teaching commitments.

While from the outside the houses gleamed uniformly white, the Masters could do as they pleased inside.

The composer Kurt Weill, born in Dessau, emigrated to the USA in the 1930s. He went to New York, the city of Feininger’s birth. When the Bauhaus Dessau was shut down by the Nazis in 1932, Feininger returned to New York, where his son Andreas became a celebrated photographer.

It was rarely as quiet as in this picture. Illustrious guests came from all over the world to acquaint themselves with his hotspot of the international avant-garde: the collector Salomon R. Guggenheim, the artist Georg Grosz, the composer Béla Bartók, the dancer Gret Palucca and many more.

László Moholy-Nagy was the man for New Media and one of the most creative minds of the Bauhaus. Hungarian by birth, until 1928 he headed the metal workshop and collaborated with industry.

He did his famous photographic studies on the side – photography was not a subject at the Bauhaus yet during his time there.

Lucia Moholy, his wife, was one of the few trained women photographers in the Bauhaus milieu. For Gropius she photographed the Dessau model houses for the modern age, including the Masters’ Houses. Her eye was crucial in creating the image of Bauhaus architecture.

In the Second World War bombs completely destroyed the Moholy-Nagy House.

The ensemble of the Masters’ Houses was incorporated into the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage in 1996 and there were long considerations and arguments in Dessau as to what to do with the destroyed part of the historical heritage. Restore it in its original form? But there weren’t enough preserved documents for that. And wouldn’t the copy obliterate the legitimacy of the original?

In the end the concept of “blurred“ recollection by the Berlin firm of architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez won through. In 2011-2014 it was restored using contemporary reconstruction and joined to the Feininger House.

In the early 20th Century Walter Gropius wanted his school of design not only to revolutionise education and design but also to markedly influence modern architecture. With his Masters’ Houses he created prototypes for the smart living of the future. And Gropius wanted to show that to the world.

Through his Director’s House he had a whole series of films produced: How can we live in a healthy and economically-effective way? Ise Gropius, his “Mrs. Bauhaus”, took thousands of visitors on tours of the light and functional living rooms to demonstrate labour-saving innovations to them like the plug sockets set into the floor next to the dining room table.

Walter Gropius lived in his Director’s House until 1928, when he moved to Berlin with his architectural firm. His successor Hannes Meyer lived here after him with his wife and two children. After Meyer was sacked in 1930, the new Director, Mies van der Rohe, came and stayed here until the Bauhaus moved to Berlin in 1932.

In 1945 incendiary bombs razed the avant-garde house to the foundations. In 1956 the Emmer House was built on them with a traditional pitched roof and remained there until it was demolished in 2010.

In 2011-2014 the architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez created the new Gropius Master’s House: as a “blurred” reconstruction.

The external shell is an exact reproduction of the proportions of the Director’s House, while inside ...