Building on Brand

The Bauhaus turned 100 this year, and a crop of museum buildings sprang up for the celebration.

- Samuel Medina

In 2019, two museums bearing the name Bauhaus appeared on the German culture circuit. Angling to capitalize on the design school’s centennial, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar was first out of the gate, opening in early April; a few clicks behind, the Bauhaus Museum Dessau followed suit in early September. A third project, the much-delayed extension to Walter Gropius’s 1979 BauhausArchiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, did not manage to keep pace and isn’t expected to open for a couple more years yet.

At the moment in Berlin, kapitän Gropius’s keel is shipwrecked in a sea of muddy ditches, its programming relocated to a temporary annex. The building, which broke ground in 1976, the same year the kapitän’s Dessau campus was restored by the German Democratic Republic, opened in 1979 and was never much loved, although footfalls dramatically increased after the Wall came down. It is visibly the result of compromise: Gropius’s original plans, drawn up in 1964 for a sloped site in the small city of Darmstadt near Frankfurt, were waylaid by local politicians; only in the following decade, after Gropius’s death, did the project find a site in then–West Berlin. The dislocation did violence to the original scheme, however, requiring extensive modifications by Gropius’s acolyte Alex Cvijanovic (not least among them translating the building to flatland).