Unbuilt Bauhaus Architecture

In Dessau, prototypes were built that today are icons of modernity – such as the Masters Houses (1925/6) by Walter Gropius (pictured here the Houses Muche / Schlemmer).

But there were also some visionary ideas that were never put into practice and remained as no more than a utopia. Here are three of them.

With its supporting struts the dwelling house he conceived for his family in 1947-8 in the American New Canaan (Connecticut) is heavily reminiscent of an earlier idea by this restless designer.

As early as 1926-7 he designed a series of spectacular dwelling and studio houses (here in a model, 2002) for himself and his colleagues in Dessau as a counter-design to the smart group of Masters’ Houses by Gropius.

It was also a small rebellion. While the Masters (like Kandinsky, Klee or Schlemmer) were moving into their supposedly luxurious Masters’ Houses in the pretty pine woods …

… the junior Masters just got 20 m² single rooms in the Studio House right next to the workshops. They complained that this was “anti-social“, especially as it was, after all, they who worked hardest for the Bauhaus idea.

The estate was planned right opposite the Bauhaus building. It was to be put into practice using prefabricated elements – the Director’s preferred building method. But Gropius initially rejected the project. When Breuer threatened to quit Dessau, Gropius finally approved the funding. But the money was never paid out. In 1928 Marcel Breuer ended his contract with the Bauhaus, and so the future architect’s first revolutionary project came to nothing.

Carl Fieger’s motivation was quite different. This talented draughtsman and designer worked in Walter Gropius‘s private firm and while he was there in his own time developed his own innovative designs which, however, like this ‘Semi-Detached House for Doctors’ (about 1924) were never built. His design was aligned with the new Objective Architecture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.

Even before his 1925 preliminary drawings definitively put his mark on the face of the new Bauhaus building and the School’s visionary style …

The architect designed factories, sports centres and schools, but what was most important to him was finding a new ideal for living and optimising the layout of the mini-house and the smallest flat. His residential house of 1927 is the only design of Fieger‘s for rationally planned small houses that was actually built.

Eduard Ludwig arrived at the Bauhaus in late 1928 when Breuer and Fieger had already left Dessau for Berlin. Trained as a carpenter, from his fifth semester he was taught architecture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the third and last Bauhaus Director.

In his assignment ideas, Mies van der Rohe was more concerned with the draughtsmanship of the design and less with putting it into practice.

But he did put one building into practice in Dessau – the drinking hall in the wall next to his Director’s House. In the design was involved one of his best students – Eduard Ludwig.

Ludwig did in the end get to build a court house project, long after his time at the Bauhaus. In 1957 five single-storey detached family houses with gardens were built from his designs in the central city location of Berlin’s Hansa Quarter …

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like Walter Gropius emigrated to the USA and took the Bauhaus avant-garde out into the world, in 1953 retrospectively described its myth, “The Bauhaus was an idea, and I believe that the cause of the gigantic influence that the Bauhaus has had in the world can be sought in the fact that it was an idea.”

This idealistic design for this glass high-rise (created in 1922, even before his time at the Bauhaus) remained a utopia.

Read more about Carl Fieger