A Bauhaus "Agora"

An "ancient agora" inside a Bauhaus museum? And yet!

The connection between ideas of antiquity and contemporary architecture isn't obvious or expected. Unless we're talking about imitation. But in the new Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, a city in former East Germany, the idea of the ancient Agora is reread as a contemporary public space within the museum.

The building has been operating since 2019. It was designed by the Barcelona-based firm Addenda Architects and was the winning proposal in a global competition with 839 entries.

The architectural idea is simple and pure: a large glass volume that is divided internally into two levels. The upper floor is a concrete black box—an "Ark" that functions as an exhibition space. Without natural light and with controlled temperature, it protects the artworks and tells the story of the Bauhaus school during its years of operation in Dessau.

The ground floor is called the "Agora." It's a large, open space roughly 50 meters long without columns, featuring an entrance, café, and shop. The remaining space has been deliberately left free. It's designed for events, presentations, temporary exhibitions, educational programs, or workshops. A space that gains meaning from people's participation in it.

This recalls the function of the portico of the Athens Conservatory and Despotopoulos's idea of connecting the ancient Agora with modern architecture. As my former teacher Yorgos Tzirtzilakis has aptly described it: the empty space that in Despotopoulos's work becomes public through people's use of it.

So too in the Museum in Dessau, the ground floor "Agora" gains meaning through coexistence. It opens onto the city and invites participation. It's the opposite of the "Ark" above, yet also its complement: then nourishes now, closed becomes open, and the past meets the present to build the future together.

A museum that doesn't just invite you to see it, but to live it and to take part.