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o commemorate the school’s 10th anniversary a major Bauhaus exhibition was staged in Zurich. The design projects included furnishings for an average apartment and furniture for defined groups of consumers. The designers, aiming to lower costs, avoided unnecessary details. The designs included folding tables and chairs, as well as a cupboard for a bachelor apartment.

 

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Josef Pohl, Bachelor's wardrobe

Meyer organized studio production of standardized products designed to be affordable by all segments of the population. The school’s greatest commercial success is a line of wall-coverings produced in the mural-painting studio. Instead of little flowers the wall-coverings use geometric ornaments suggestive of the structure of cloth. The advantage of the wall-coverings is that the images are small and irregular, making it easy to apply the strips to the wall. Another plus is that small rooms are made to seem larger.

 

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Melnikov House and workshop, 1929

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ne of the best known of Vkhutemas’ teacher-architects, Konstantin Melnikov, designed and built his own home and studio on a lot in central Moscow. Its two intersecting cylinders sum up Melnikov’s utopian vision of communal housing and his personal ideal of the home as castle. The structure is also a fantastic testament to efficiency and economy in use of materials in the impoverished conditions of the late 1920s.

 

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Melnikov House

Photo by Igor Palmin

Narkomfin building, 1930s

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Portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1934

Photo by Werner Rohde © Bauhaus Archive

 

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annes Meyer was replaced as director (forced out because of Bolshevik sympathies) by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Like Gropius, Mies studied under Peter Behrens. He stayed away from politics but found himself confronted by many challenges, some connected to the economic crisis of 1929, others arising from Dessau’s disaffection for the Bauhaus. The city eventually halted all aid to the school, lowering budgets significantly and initiating no further public commissions.


In 1931 Hannes Meyer, along with a team of other architects, moved to the Soviet Union, aiming to realize revolutionary ideas but became quickly disillusioned and returned to Germany.

 

 

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Caricature of Hannes Meyer

 

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Corridors of Narkomfin building

 

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ith the push to industrialize the country at fever pitch, there were shortages of specialists for industry. Institutions of higher learning were expected to produce them quickly. Vkhutemas’ hybrid structure (art/crafts) began to crack. A decree ordered the transfer of students from industrial and art departments to specifically industrial and art schools. The teachers and directors became forced to defend the notion of an architecture department as a creative discipline against the government’s repeated attempts to regard it as an engineering specialty.


Construction eventually ceased on the Finance Ministry complex. The design cast an enormous influence on Le Corbusier, whose famous Marseilles “residential unit” (1945) incorporates Moisei Ginzburg’s Type F plan.