Bauhaus City

    MUF, London

One may see the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau as the rudiments of a new city. Besides the buildings traversing the city, efforts were made in Ludwig Hilbersheimer’s classes to work on the city of Dessau as a whole. Gropius presented the findings of the overall settlement plan for Dessau, drawn up by students, at the 4th CIAM conference in Athens in 1933, in an international exhibition focusing on 30 cities.

The historic layer of the Bauhaus city is a puzzle made up of different parts in all sorts of scales. How do these individual parts interact, and what holds them together on the general urban level? The puzzle also incorporates the disseminated images of the Bauhaus city, which consciously exploit the bird’s eye perspective and the Junkers aircraft. The elements – the photos, plans and buildings – that made up the Bauhaus City in the 1920s must be reconstructed and put into context with the images, projects and projections, which are associated with the Bauhaus City today.

It is possible that a mosaic may emerge of a Bauhaus City with diverse links, associations and perspectives, which places the complex coherencies of Dessau’s urban development with the Bauhaus outside the architecture-oriented image of the Bauhaus City.

Pictures of the Workshop