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The
Dessau
EffectWhat is known today as the “Bilbao Effect” certainly didn’t happen for the first time when Gehry’s fishformed Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997. Times and circumstances were different, but when the German Bauhaus school moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1926, it had a similar effect on the city which lasts until today. We’ll call it the “Dessau Effect” for now.
The Bauhaus school was dedicated to modernism, intending to combine craft and fine art. From its founding in Weimar in 1919, its ideas attracted heavy criticism from conservative circles and when the nationalists took control of the state parliament of Thuringia in 1924, they cut the institution’s funding in half. So Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus from 1919-1928, started looking for a new home.
How the Bauhaus has defined the image of Dessau since 1926
“Junkers Luftbild”, postcard from 1926. (Photo: Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)
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Postcard from 1938 when the Bauhaus school was already closed and the building used as “Frauenarbeitsschule”. (Photo: Courtesy Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)
After only five years of existence, the Bauhaus was already an internationally acclaimed institution, so several German cities made rival bids to attract the school to relocate to them. The race was won by the smallest, Dessau, which was then a booming industrial town in the center of Germany. In the 1920s, this region was Germany’s Silicon Valley, inhabited by forward-looking industrials like Hugo Junkers, who had just developed the first aeroplane constructed entirely of metal. The interest from industry in the Bauhaus school and their formal and material experiments was reciprocated by the institution’s interest in further developing its ideas on the unity of art, technology and industrial mass production. When the new Bauhaus building, designed by Gropius himself, opened on the outskirts of Dessau in 1926, it definitively changed the image of the city. And today, the Bauhaus Foundation which now resides in the original building is a key element in this de-industrialized and shrinking city, which is trying to redefine its image now as the Bauhausstadt. Unlike Bilbao’s, the “Dessau Effect” has already been working its magic (with some interruptions) for over 90 years. (fh)
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»Tradition is a dare for innovation.«
Alvaro Siza
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