Wo ist das Bauhaus gegangen?

As a part of examining the Bauhaus movement, organized by Walter Gropius in 1919 with the founding of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, our group sought to find traces of Bauhaus architecture in modern-day building. Specifically, we sought to answer the question of whether or not the influence and basic principles of the Bauhaus architectural style are significant and visible forces in architechture of the present period. Our interest and concern with this question was further excited in light of the context in which we approached and focused our research in Berlin. Given the overall focus of our study, modern day Berlin in relation to Bauhaus and Berlin als Baustelle (Berlin as a construction site), the question of what archtectural Bauhaus might or might not have evolved into seemed an even more relevant and appropriate subject to investigate. Unfortunately, most of the energy we expended trying to pin point exactly what Bauhaus architecture might had evolved into left us dissappointed, empty-handed, and seized with the additional questions concerning the fate of Bauhaus. We discovered that trying to illuminate an obvious and definate end, in our present epoch, into which the philosophical methods and ideas governing the Bauhaus "style" might have evolved was as easy a task as hypothesizing on how expressionism had effected all of present day literature. In 1927 increasingly oppressive and frustrating politcal forces caused Gropius to move the original school from Weimar to Dessau. The school was moved into a structure that visually reflected the key ideas of Bauhaus, a structure designed by Gropius himself. It was here that the Swiss architect, Hannes Meyer, was appointed to implement Bauhaus's first systematic program of architecture. Carefully designed by Meyer, the architecture program quickly turned out to be a success. The program was supported by the emphasis of a scientific method that completely ignored all unnecessary and frivolous aesthetic considerations, considerations that did not reinforce the "socialist-inspired" goal of absolute functionalism in building. After Gropius's resignation Meyer succeeded him as director of the school in Dessau and it was under his direction that the basic program of the Bauhaus transformed, abandoning the original idea of a collectively unified institution of art and becoming an establishment of production, focused of serving social needs. In promoting a rigorous functionalism in architechture, Meyer strongly asserted that "building" should be planned and organized with regard to such specific factors as economics, technical materials and availability, as wellas social objectives and purposes. In his mind both the function and the form of a building had to be completely intergrated; there was no room for frivalty. Thus, in considering what Bauhaus was envisioned to be and the aim and purpose of its "functionalism", one can easily conclude that, on the whole, the influence of Bauhaus philosophy and method of "building" have been excluded from the modern vocabulary of architectural design. Nowhere is this fact more obvious than in present day Berlin, the focus of our study, where older, more outdated forms of architecture are often favored as frequently as modern forms. And while it may be unfare to single out Berlin in this particular context, given the fact that much of what is going on in the city involves an intense desire to "restore" the pre-war, pre-disaster metropolis of the early twentieth century. However, given the strong history Bauhaus shares with Berlin coupled with the many possibilities presented by modern industrial technology, it seems strange that more Bauhaus-like structures are not surfacing on Berlin's cityscape. Our group has come to define the present trend in Berlin, probably much of Germany, in fact, just on smaller scales, as remembrance and "facadification", a process in which the facade of a pre-war building is either completely resurrected or restored while the inside of the same structure is gutted and replaced with a completely new, usually non-congruous interior. Thus, although much of modern architecture tries to mask itself as something completely independent of the great multitude of building that has proceeded it, most often it copies or is reminiscent of classical forms and architectural vocabulary of a distant past. In contrast, the Bauhaus envisioned as its aim a break with the traditional language of building, intending to create a whole new international style that would express and intergrate the function of a structure with its visual aesthetic, form, and construction. In other words,the building was ment to relate function or activity through clear and sensible building and form.