Hannes Meyer - Bauhaus

Bauhaus

Walter Gropius appointed Meyer head of the Bauhaus architecture department when it was finally established in April 1927. (Stam had been Gropius's first choice.) Meyer brought his radical functionalist viewpoint he named, in 1929, Die neue Baulehre (the new way to build), that architecture was an organizational task with no relationship to aesthetics, that buildings should be low cost and designed to fulfill social needs. He was also an ardent Marxist and Communist.

Meyer brought the two most significant important building commissions for the school, both of which still stand: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau, and the headquarters of the Federal School of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB), a confederation of German trade unions, in Bernau. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.

But he also brought political dissension, both within the Bauhaus and outside. Inside the school, particularly after he became Bauhaus director in February 1928, he tightened the program around architecture and industrial design, forcing the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and other figures. In the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, Meyer's own outspoken communism and the growth of the Communist student organization in the Bauhaus became a threat to the existence of the school. Mayor Hesse of Dessau fired him, with a monetary settlement, on August 1, 1930. Meyer's open letter in a left-wing newspaper two weeks later characterizes the Bauhaus as "Incestuous theories (blocking) all access to healthy, life-oriented design... As head of the Bauhaus, I fought the Bauhaus style".