The Controversial Director

Meyer’s approach to building projects was new as well. Architecture should develop out of the specific conditions of the location, and they had to be thoroughly analysed beforehand. Meyer introduced empirical studies at the Bauhaus – at that time something completely new in the training of architects. Today it is standard.

“For instance, the students analyse the living conditions in workers’ houses on the margins of industrial areas – the direction wind, smoke and soot come from, the visibility conditions and the impact of dust from the street and traffic noise,” noted the guest lecturer Karel Teige at the Bauhaus at the time.

A new direction was needed in many respects, and Meyer proved to be the right man at the right time. He restructured the workshops, intensified contacts with industry – and he did a whole lot more too.

In the "Laubenganghäuser" (houses with arbour walkways) with which in 1928 he extended the estate begun in 1926 by Gropius in Dessau-Törten, he demonstrated what design for the people was supposed to look like.

Bauhaus wallpaper, conceived specially for small flats with its understated designs, even became the Bauhaus bestseller.

At Meyer‘s request, Oskar Schlemmer designed the course The Human Being (Der Mensch), which became compulsory for all third semester students. As well as figure drawing, it involved the teaching of psychology, philosophy and the history of ideas.

Meanwhile, Meyer showed how theory could be brought to bear in practice in his construction projects in which psychological concerns were given prominent attention. For example, he gave the houses arbour walkways in an attempt “to relieve the disadvantages of the conventional tenement”.

In the arbour walkway, from which all the flats can be entered, the residents can meet each other “in public, like on a street pavement.”

Another groundbreaking concept is the design for the new German Labour Unions School in Bernau near Berlin, with which Meyer and his partner Hans Wittwer won the competition in 1928.

Meyer himself never made any secret of his own political leaning and was increasingly radicalised from the cooperative movement to Marxism. This was his downfall, as he could not manage to orient the Bauhaus internally to his socialist goals while at the same time representing it to the world in a neutral fashion and manoeuvring it through the politically difficult times.

"And so I was cut down from behind. In the Bauhaus holidays of all times, when I was away from the Bauhaus members who stood close to me. The Bauhaus camarilla is cockahoop. The Dessau local press falls into a delirium of moral outrage. The Bauhaus condor Gropius swoops down from the Eiffel Tower and pecks at my directorial corpse, and on the Adriatic W. Kandinsky stretches out on the sand, relieved: It is done.”

Meyer went first to the Soviet Union, where he taught at the Academy for Architecture among other places, and later went to Mexico. He broke with the Marxism of Western European intellectuals and became a committed Stalinist. This was the turning point that marked his break with his previous friends, including many Bauhaus people. In 1949 he finally returned to Switzerland, where he died in 1954.

“Perhaps the huge influence Hannes Meyer had on all of us – regardless of whether we agreed with him in this or that or not – lay in the fact that he let us see into his own inner searching, that he let us be part of the pro and contra that was going on within himself. For us, in the quite unusual way he taught and entered into discussion with us Hannes Meyer was a great and strong experience in being human.”