International opening | Bauhaus Museum, Weimar

The Bauhaus Museum in Weimar has opened as part of Germany’s centenary celebrations of the iconic art and design school. Today, Bauhaus is one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century and its significance endures into the 21st. While the school itself lasted 14 years, its legacy of functional design and modern architecture continues. 

Founded in Weimar, eastern Germany, in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, the school was moved to Dessau, then Berlin, before being shut down by the Nazis in 1933. Marking the centenary, Germany has renovated its numerous Bauhaus buildings across the country and opened new museums. 

Berlin-based architect Heike Hanada’s €27m project has created a minimalistic, cube-shaped building to present work made in Weimar between 1919 and 1925. Exhibition spaces are spread across five levels and display more than 1,000 objects from a collection of 13,000 items. This includes 168 selected works collected by Gropius for safe keeping following his expulsion from Weimar by the Nazis. 

 Ulrike Bestgen is the director of the Bauhaus Museum. 

You’re exhibiting the world’s oldest Bauhaus collection. What’s innovative about the new museum? 

Ulrike Bestgen: We continually asked ourselves how we can best communicate the Bauhaus story and what’s most important to our visitors. In Germany, there has long been a separation between the concept behind an exhibition and how it is communicated in it. We have put a lot of effort in to make that work. Our colleagues who studied at the Bauhaus University spent two years talking to local 14- to 16-year-olds, focusing on what they would like to see on show. 

The students prepared “hands on” stations for the museum, which reflect a desire to not only view exhibits but also to touch objects. Particularly successful were large, reconstructed building blocks used by Gropius, which the students made into houses they would like to live in. These houses are on permanent display.

For the museum’s architecture competition, we stipulated that while Bauhaus traditions should be reflected, the building should also not strictly resemble a Bauhaus design. So, while we used metal and glass, typical elements of Bauhaus design, and colours relating to the Swiss experimental painter Johannes Itten (who taught a course on colour use in Weimar), the museum is a minimalistic cube. 

In Germany, we call it a solitary “strong building”. In many architecturally designed museum buildings, a large part of the room is wasted. Instead, our museum offers multiple exhibiting opportunities. Hanada has created large rooms that combine two floors – the foyer is 11 metres high. There are also smaller rooms, with a fairly low height of four metres, for the display of the whole exhibition. 

The building is solid and heavy, but the outside layer is lined with LED lights. At night, the building appears to float, changing in mass from day to night. We are happy with the result. However, I think Gropius would have had a different idea of the architecture – he was the museum’s first curator, with his gift of 168 objects to the former art collection of Weimar. He focused on forming the afterlife of the Bauhaus, which is what we have carefully honoured. 

The word “Bauhaus” combines two German words: “building” (bau) and “house” (haus). This reflects the ethos of building an efficient new society. In 1919, the Bauhaus challenge was housing. Today, our problems remain the same. Many German families cannot afford luxury houses, yet  require affordable housing.

The key Bauhaus questions were how can we live in a modern and efficient way, leaving behind all that is old-fashioned? The museum utilises sustainable techniques in heating, climate and security. Yet its role is not simply to display 1,000 Bauhaus items, but to answer questions imagined by Gropius himself: “How do we want to live together?” and “Do we want modern homes, smart homes, tiny homes?”

Visitors can download a free app called Bauhaus Plus on their smartphones, which enables them to walk through the exhibition enjoying explanations for selected objects and topics. We also have films from the 1920s showing the atmosphere of that time. And, of course, there are texts on the wall with several longer panels that explain certain topics. 

We had 20,000 visitors in the first two weeks. During that time, the museum elicited controversial responses. People thought the building was block-like, dominant and unattractive. They would have preferred the transparency of glass. And while many visitors liked the exhibition, others wanted it told in chronological order. 

Instead, we have focused on certain Bauhaus topics as the exhibition ascends through three floors of the building, such as the school as an experiment, a Bauhaus modern theatre room, and the Bauhaus daily routine. We felt that telling the story in a chronological order would be old-fashioned – an approach not right for the 21st century.