Arieh Sharon - Architectural Studies

Architectural Studies

Sharon spent a month in Berlin and arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he was admitted to the preliminary course – the famous Bauhaus Vorkurs – by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. Sharon studied under Josef Albers, whose teachings were based on letting the student experience different materials, trying them out, and making experiments. Sharon’s exercises – turning two-dimensional sheets of paper and metal into three-dimensional shapes – were shown in a Bauhaus exhibition. In April 1927, Hannes Meyer was appointed head of the building department and Sharon was to be greatly influenced by his teacher’s pragmatical and functional approach to architecture. In 1928 he and two other Bauhäusler, Gunta Stölzl, head of the Bauhaus weaving workshop and the student Peer Bücking visited the Vkhutemas Academy in Moscow, an avant garde art school with similar aims as the Bauhaus. Some time after their return Sharon and Stölzl were married. In 1929, he received his Bauhaus diploma and was immediately put in charge of Hannes Meyer’s architectural office in Berlin, to supervise the construction of the ADGB building – central college of the German Trade Union Federation - on site in Bernau, which was remodeled in 2008.