The Unknown Bauhaus (A)

How do we build the future with the knowledge of the past?

Over the past year I worked on the preparations for the centenary of the Bauhaus in Dessau. One of the tasks I was given by the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau was to design the tour of the building of the old employment office (Arbeitsamt) by Walter Gropius.

It is one of the least known Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, and a fascinating case. It is not white, it has no clean lines, and in short it does not look like what most people consider "Bauhaus" aesthetics.

But this is the truth about the Bauhaus: it is not just one thing.

This year, as part of the centenary programme titled "An die Substanz" (To the Substance), the Foundation turns its focus to materials: on one hand those that defined modernity, on the other the sustainable materials of today that concern our own era.

The artist group Superflex installed a sculptural work of pink bricks around the Arbeitsamt. These bricks are not fired. They are made of raw clay; they dissolve over time and return to the earth.

This choice carries several meanings. First, the relationship with time: when we build, we rarely think about what will become of the material once the building ceases to exist. It is what we used to say as students — how to build structures that will one day become beautiful ruins.

Kyriakos Krokos, one of the most significant greek archtiects, had already spoken of this, describing the old huts of Samos island and the dry-stone walls of the Aegean that, as they age, return their materials to the earth that bore them.

Second, it speaks of cohabitation and sustainability. Until now, building has meant the displacement of the plants, animals and organisms that lived there before us. The bricks of this installation are not industrial; on the contrary, they are shaped by hand, full of holes, cracks and "imperfections" that allow other forms of life to grow and move within them.

The placement of Superflex's work is no accident. The Arbeitsamt is defined by its yellow brick and its semicircular plan, which organises the flow of the unemployed towards the offices.

The building is a child of the Weimar Republic, where for the first time the welfare state and labour reintegration were established as state policy. A new social provision that the Bauhaus turns into space — showing how architecture supports social policy, but also the reverse: how social policy needs architecture in order to communicate with the public.

So the Arbeitsamt, Gropius's last work before he left the school, stands as one of the tangible examples of the Bauhaus vision for a new, better and more democratic society.

At the same time, the use of brick reveals the pluralism of the Bauhaus, which is not exhausted in straight lines and the colour white. It is a material tied to mass industrial production and to the possibilities that the industrial revolution opened up in construction.

Superflex's work does the same thing in a different way. Here the brick is deliberately handmade, and through a spatial sculptural installation it speaks of a question of the present: the relationship of architecture and people with the environment, the coexistence of all species on the planet, the sustainability of materials.

And so the knowledge of the past comes into the present not as a museum object, but as a starting point to understand today and to think about tomorrow.

It is a tangible sign of the breadth of the Bauhaus legacy: not as an aesthetic movement, but as a method for answering the challenges of each era.

In other words, the Bauhaus was what Ioannis Despotopoulos, another important greek architect and the only person from Greece who came into direct contact with the school, beautifully said: a way "to see and to perceive reality".