THE OLD BAUHAUS MUSEUM IN DESSAU

photographs by Massimo Pacifico

The Bauhaus Museum Dessau is being built for the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus and will open on September 8th 2019, the centenary year. So far, it has only been possible to present the prized collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in a limited way in the Bauhaus Building. In the new museum, a suitable space to publicly display the collection is being created for the very first time. The collection comprises around 49,000 catalogued exhibits. The new museum will have an exhibition space of 2,100 square meters and a total usable area of 3,500 square meters.

The Bauhaus Museum Dessau is being built by addenda architects (González Hinz Zabala), an up-and-coming architecture office from Barcelona. Their design was selected from 831 submissions in an open international competition held in late 2015. The jury was convinced by the museum concept – a building within a building – comprising a soaring steelwork block in a glass envelope. On the upper floor, a hermetic ‘Black Box’ will enable the presentation of the collection. The museum tasks of collecting, preservation and conservation will be performed here. The transparent ground floor, the museum foyer, will serve as an open platform offering among other things curatorial freedom for temporary exhibitions of contemporary works and events. The museum is located in the city park in the centre of Dessau, where it will establish a connection between the built-up part of the city on the Kavalierstraße and the green periphery of the park.

The new building will cost 28 million euros, borne equally by the Federal Government and the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt. The site is provided by the municipality of Dessau-Roßlau.

The Bauhaus architecture was able to survive National Socialism, WWII and the GDR era largely intact, although some buildings were damaged. The GDR first rediscovers the Bauhaus legacy in 1976. It reconstructs the Bauhaus Building in line with monument conservation guidelines and establishes the Wissenschaftlich-Kulturelle Zentrum (WKZ), which among other things starts to build up the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s current collection and reactivates the Bauhaus stage. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is established after reunification in 1994. To this day this researches, conserves and passes on the Bauhaus legacy in the form of the buildings, the collection and the variety of themes spanning architecture, design and art.

The Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar and Dessau have been included on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1996.

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