… continuing from our earlier post on the original Bauhaus Masters’ Houses,
The first house we saw when coming from the School was the new Director’s House (Direktonenhaus) where the information desk is situated. Why are there new Masters’ Houses ?
After the Bauhauslers moved out in 1932/1933, the school was closed by the Nazis, and the Houses were altered. As the home of the Director, the Gropius building was large, had a garage and rooms for servants’ quarters, all surrounded by a tall white wall.
Dessau lost three-fifths of its buildings during World War II, being the headquarters for an important aircraft manufacturer, Junkers. The Gropius House and the Moholy-Nagy House were destroyed on March 7, 1945, although the basement and garage remained. The city, then in East Germany, sold the houses to Junkerswerke, a company that worked with the Bauhaus School and Marcel Breuer to develop tubular steel furniture before the war.
In 1956, the Emmer family purchased the site intending to rebuild the original house on the remaining footprint, but the planning office rejected this, and they were only allowed to build in a traditional style with a pitched roof.
The Haus Emmer had been on this site for almost 60 years with an internal layout almost exactly to Gropius’ ideal. It was only demolished in 2010 to allow for the new building to take its place.
A competition was held which was won by the Berlin architecture firm Bruno Fioretti Marquez. The design deliberately avoided a historically accurate reconstruction. Instead, the goal was to evoke the original design through a playful approach based on fuzzy memory – “architecture of imprecision”.
The new building was completed in 2014. When visiting the surviving and the new houses, it has been said that the visitors will become aware of the differences between historical structures and reinterpretations while taking into account the imprecision of memories. We think the choice of this design reflects Germany’s view of its past history.
In the cubic design of the new houses, the style of the old masters’ houses are found again, but the bare walls and ghostly translucent window express the destruction and the void left by the real houses.
The residential design of Gropius has now evolved into an open space that is used for exhibitions.
Last but not least, is the restored Trinkhalle – which was the first thing we saw as we approached the Masters’ House site. It was originally a 1932 modification by Mies van der Rohe of the wall built by Walter Gropius around his own residence. The so-called “pump room” was a refreshment stand which broke the monotony of the austere white wall that blocked the view of a group of elegant old buildings. The original Trinkhalle was demolished in the 60’s, and rebuilt in 2016.
Today, the Masters’ Houses are used by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. We were able to visit all the houses on this site except two that were used as residences for visiting artists around the year. To see more images of the Masters’ Houses, use this link to Google Arts and Culture’s Model Houses for the Modern Age site.