Renovation of one of the most famous buildings of the 20th century, the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius, is to be completed next year in Dessau, the provincial German city that is a place of pilgrimage for design enthusiasts from round the world.
Around 80,000 people come every year to tour the Bauhaus even in its semi-restored state. Erected in 1926, the design-college building is a symbol of unadorned 20th century style and is on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites.
The renovations have taken almost 10 years so far. The "glass curtain" -- the all-glass outside wall that is common in any modern city today but was revolutionary 80 years ago -- has been restored.
At the boxy Meisterhaeuser, the nearby homes for the great artists and designers who taught here, the stucco walls have been repainted pure white, offsetting the narrow ribbon windows.
Tourism officials in Dessau, 110km southwest of Berlin, say that in addition to the 80,000 people who pay to tour the campus and Meisterhaeuser, large numbers come to Dessau to see the exteriors for free.
The Bauhaus movement aimed to unite art and the latest technology with a new focus on functionality. Features of Bauhaus-style architecture, also known as the international style, include glass curtain walls, cubic blocks and unsupported corners.
The Bauhaus building had them all. Above the ground floor, Gropius sheathed the studio and workshop wing in an extensive glass curtain wall so that it appeared to hover like a transparent box.
For next year's 80th anniversary, a permanent exhibition on the history of the building and the movement will be created.
Today, Bauhaus design or echoes of it are found around the globe in factory and office architecture, in the layout of newspaper pages or in the tubular-steel furniture and fittings in many homes.
Tradesmen are still hard at work on the interiors used by professors such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonell Feininger, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer in the years before the school was forced to move to Berlin in 1932.
The steel-and-concrete skeleton of the building has been repaired and the workshops have been gutted. The heating, plumbing and wiring and part of the roof have been replaced.
Work begins late this year on the North Wing, which houses the Bauhaus Foundation and parts of Anhalt technical college.
Monika Markgraf, the architect, says she is doing a mixture of conservation of what exists and restoration of what had vanished.
She discovered some windows from the original facade which had been ripped out in 1976: they were being used in a garden as a hothouse. Markgraf had the frames repaired, and re-inserted the windows in their old place.
She said the Bauhaus would not be restored to exactly the way it was in 1926: later modifications, such as the present windows in the assembly hall, are being kept where they are in good condition.
"People should be able to see traces of the building's intervening history," she explained.
It certainly has been an eventful history.
The Nazis, who took over Germany in 1933, loathed the Bauhaus movement. World War II bombing damaged the name-giving building.
When the East German communists took over, they rejected the Bauhaus style initially, but by the 1970s were sufficiently aware of its worldwide importance to reconstruct the original site.
As many as nine coats of paint in different colors have come off some walls in the course of restoration.
"It's a sort of archeology," Markgraf said.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had