Bauhaus Museum Dessau

The con­trast could hardly be more dra­matic: Whereas the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar evinces a provoca­tively mon­u­men­tal order, Addenda Ar­chi­tects from Barcelona grasp their Bauhaus Museum in Dessau as being a dis­course on various aspects of Mod­ernism.

Talking to FSB, José Zabala ex­plains the effect his own ex­pe­ri­ence of Spain’s eco­nomic crisis had on the blue­print, the role Lina Bo Bardi played in same, and what East German slab-con­struc­tion build­ings have to do with his prac­tice’s museum build­ing. The Museum is being of­fi­cially opened on 8 Sep­tem­ber 2019.

You are a young prac­tice without a lot of build­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, and yet you won the in­ter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tion with over 800 entries in 2015. How did that come about?

Jose Zabala: We were not very ex­pe­ri­enced in build­ing, but we were very used to en­ter­ing com­pe­ti­tions and we had already won prices. My part­ners and I fin­ished our degree around 2005, just before the global eco­nomic crisis hit Spain.

In 2007/08 the market col­lapsed and many pro­jects were stopped. That led to our not being able to build very much.

How did you ap­proach the com­pe­ti­tion?

We pro­duced a very straight­for­ward kind of design. We gave con­sid­er­a­tion to the pri­or­i­ties of the remit whilst also bearing the site in mind. The site is located between the park and the city centre and the build­ing marks the border between these two en­ti­ties. Another plank in our ap­proach con­cerned keeping formal re­sources to a minimum. So we de­signed a box for the per­ma­nent col­lec­tion and el­e­vated it from the street in order to create visual con­nec­tions between the two parts of the city and get the in­sti­tu­tion’s func­tion across to the public space.

Were there any sub­stan­tial changes during the build­ing process after you had won the com­pe­ti­tion?

One of the crucial aspects of our design is that it is a very re­silient scheme in respect of the form the con­crete plans might take. Thus we were able to change ma­te­ri­als or move things a bit from one place to another without this im­pair­ing the main thrust of the design. The museum will be a flex­i­ble build­ing that has the ca­pac­ity to absorb many kinds of ac­tiv­ity. Most changes are a result of eco­nomic con­di­tions. The bridge, for in­stance, was ini­tially in­tended to be a steel struc­ture. We had to find a cheaper so­lu­tion, but in design terms it is more or less the same.

You also had to change the façade. The so­lu­tion im­ple­mented looks rather dif­fer­ent from what you pre­sented in the com­pe­ti­tion.

The glass façade was one of the most ex­pen­sive el­e­ments, hence its final com­po­si­tion and ma­te­ri­al­ity are a re­flec­tion of eco­nomic re­stric­tions. Our in­ten­tion during the com­pe­ti­tion entry was to use flint glass, but this might have com­pro­mised the fea­si­bil­ity of the entire project at a bud­get­ing level and we there­fore decided within the first two months of the plan­ning process to create a more con­ven­tional façade by using float glass.

Ist there a link to Mod­ernist ar­chi­tec­ture?

Some people ask us about modern her­itage and the links between our design and Mies van der Rohe. I like the idea of viewing the new museum as a con­tem­po­rary rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of modern prin­ci­ples through the prism of current eco­nomic con­di­tions. The pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion we ex­pe­ri­enced as young ar­chi­tects in Spain has made us aware of the need to develop strate­gies that make our build­ings as cost-ef­fec­tive as pos­si­ble. I think the client liked the project because they un­der­stood that it could be ac­com­plished on time and to budget. In terms of design and shape, the build­ing is almost what we wanted it to be. There was a tight budget of just 25 million euros and that has been adhered to.

You once de­scribed the project as a rem­i­nis­cence on the orig­i­nal Bauhaus build­ing by Walter Gropius, calling your design “low res­o­lu­tion at its best”. What do you mean by that?

This also has to do with eco­nomic re­stric­tions. Our museum is not only a simple and very straight­for­ward design but also a build­ing that relies on eco­nom­i­cal pro­ce­dures and the use of in­dus­trial prod­ucts. The com­bi­na­tion of all these factors results in “low res­o­lu­tion”.

When seeing your design, I was also re­minded of Lina Bo Bardi’s Sao Paulo Museum of Art.

Ac­tu­ally, what is hap­pen­ing in Dessau with our build­ing is a clash of these two modern ap­proaches from either side of the At­lantic. On the one hand the classic avant-garde of Gropius, on the other a late mod­ernist icon from the Global South. Ob­vi­ously, Lina Bo Bardi is im­por­tant for us. But Dessau has com­pletely dif­fer­ent cli­matic con­di­tions than Brazil, there­fore we had to use a glass en­ve­lope. We see the func­tion of the glass in our design as also having affini­ties with Siegfried Ebeling’s Der Raum als Membran (“Space as Mem­brane”), which was pub­lished at Dessau in 1926. Ebeling had the idea of the façade as a kind of mem­brane that creates dif­fer­ent con­di­tions on either side whilst also fa­cil­i­tat­ing processes of ex­change between the two. Glass is con­ducive to this state – it’s a bit like having a trop­i­cal build­ing in a German context.

There was a public debate con­cern­ing the site for the new museum. The former Bauhaus di­rec­tor Philipp Oswalt pre­ferred a site next to the Bauhaus build­ing but the re­spon­si­ble politi­cians chose the north-east­ern corner of the Stadt­park. What do you think about the urban and his­tor­i­cal context of the build­ing?

It’s very in­ter­est­ing because it’s a place con­tain­ing a mul­ti­tude of his­tor­i­cal layers. The Kava­lier­strasse is Dessau’s former mon­u­men­tal axis.

But, because of the massive bomb­ings during World War II, only very few of these build­ings remain. The Stadt­park is a green void, created after the war. And there are large numbers of slab-con­struc­tion build­ings. Some people say there is some con­nec­tion between our project and these slab-con­struc­tion build­ings. I think there is indeed a kind of con­nec­tion in that, in both cases, economy is crucial to the ar­chi­tec­ture’s ma­te­ri­al­ity and ap­pear­ance. There is also the ques­tion of so­lid­ity, since the glass is more trans­par­ent at times and more opaque at others.

At night, we will see ac­tiv­i­ties inside the build­ing pro­ject­ing into the public space. During the day, the build­ing will some­times look more like a block, in the process re­call­ing the dense urban struc­ture of the old city. The build­ing reacts to these dif­fer­ent aspects of the city and these dif­fer­ent moments in time. And the build­ing is, of course, sup­posed to attract people to the city centre. Nowa­days, when leaving the train station and walking to the Bauhaus build­ing, you com­pletely forget about the other part of the city. The museum will hope­fully help forge new links.