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Come to Germany

12-19-2008

New York, 19 December, 2008

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	Germany Celebrates 90 Years of Bauhaus Design From sleek glass and steel skyscrapers to the matte black minimalism of high-end stereo components to the familiar pictograms for men’s and ladies’ washrooms - in thousands, maybe millions of ways, the look and feel of life today traces back to a single design school in Germany that existed for only 14 years, from 1919 to 1933. In 2009, Germany celebrates the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus — literally translated "building school" - with events and special exhibitions in the three German cities where the school was founded and operated: Weimar, Dessau and Berlin. Weimar, where the Bauhaus began, was an unlikely birthplace for such a modern esthetic, and remains an unlikely - but beautiful - place to learn about it. To Germans, Weimar is better known as the late 18th-century home of two of the country’s most important poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. It was here, in 1919, that the architect Walter Gropius founded an academy to teach the most up-to-date ideas in painting and printmaking, pottery, industrial design, interior design, weaving and textiles, typography and graphic design. Ironically, despite the school’s name, architecture was not initially on the curriculum. Students wishing to learn building design were sent to work in Gropius’s private architecture office. Nor is there much indication of the Bauhaus in the look of Weimar today. In fact, the city’s Bauhaus Museum, established in 1995, is not in a steel and glass pavilion but a pink stucco, two- storey building from the 18th century. Its permanent exhibition includes groundbreaking works by Gropius, color theorist Johannes Itten, painter Lyonel Feininger and designer Marcel Breuer, as well as various pieces from the Bauhaus workshops. The core of the myriad of events celebrating Bauhaus’ 90th anniversary in Weimar is the exhibition "The Birth of the Bauhaus", from April 1 to July 5, at the Bauhaus Museum and other venues around the town. It will present Weimar as the laboratory that germinated the ideas later fully developed in Dessau and Berlin, and which subsequently gained worldwide recognition.  www.thueringen-tourismus.de In 1925, given the chance to have its own buildings, the Bauhaus moved to the slightly larger city of Dessau, near the Elbe river. The original Gropuis-designed school building, carefully renovated, survives there, along with a few of the "masters’ houses" - one of them now a museum honoring the Dessau composer Kurt Weill - and a number of other buildings around the town. The school and houses together have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In Dessau, the focus for 2009 is on the years of the Dessau Bauhaus School: 1925 to 1932. Teacher and student works from every department and discipline—including carpentry and metalwork as well as architecture—will show the development and working methods of the "College of Design Bauhaus Dessau" and its emphasis on interdisciplinary learning and production. In early 1928 Walter Gropius officially resigned as director of the Bauhaus and eventually moved to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and founded a major American architecture office, which designed amongst others the MetLife Building in New York. Two years later the directorship passed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The school’s modernism was too much for Nazi taste and in 1932 the party moved to have the building demolished. The motion failed, but eight months later Mies shut down the school in Dessau and moved it, now as a private institution to Berlin. Within a year, however, that school was closed by the authorities and Mies was expelled from Germany. He emigrated to the US, where he became director of the Illinois Institute of Technology, leaving a lasting legacy in the U.S. with generations of students and his famous buildings, such as the Farnsworth Building, and the Seagram Building in New York.  www.germanoriginality.com While the school’s time in Berlin may have been brief, the Bauhaus style has since thrived in that city as in very few other places. From July 22nd to October 4th next year, the exhibition "Modell Bauhaus," at the Martin Gropius Building in Berlin, will present the school’s design icons of the early 20th century in a joint project of Berlin’s Bauhaus Archive with the Bauhaus collections from Weimar and Dessau.  www.bauhaus.de This exhibition also will be shown at Museum of Modern Art in New York, starting in October of 2009.  http://moma.org Other major exhibitions in Germany celebrating the Bauhaus Year, besides the main events in Weimar and Berlin, will be held in several cities throughout 2009: Bauhaus Exhibition in Frankfurt: Bauhaus 21st - An Ongoing Legacy (March 6th 2009), Deutsches Architekturmuseum  www.dam-online.de Bauhaus Exhibition in Erfurt: "Controversy about the Bauhaus" (June 7th - August 2nd, 2009), Kunshalle Erfurt  www.weimar.de Bauhaus Exhibition in Erfurt: "Franz Ehrlich" (August 1st - October 11th, 2009), Neues Museum  www.weimar.de Bauhaus Exhibition in Jena: "Wassily Kandinsky" (September 6th - November 22nd, 2009), Stadtmuseum Jena  www.weimar.de Bauhaus Exhibition in Apolda: "Feininger and the Bauhaus" (September 13th - December 20th, 2009), Kunsthaus Apolda Avantgarde  www.weimar.de For additional information on the Bauhaus and other Bauhaus sites in Germany along with general travel information on Germany, please visit  www.cometogermany.com