New master houses for Dessau

The famous Meisterhaus estate has been repaired, they say in Dessau. Repaired, not reconstructed. This language is important to politicians, conservationists and architects, because for decades there was a dispute about how to deal with the famous Meisterhaus estate near the even more famous Bauhaus buildings in Dessau. There were loud voices rejecting the rebuilding of the two houses that were hit by a bomb in 1945 – the single Gropius house and the semi-detached Moholy-Nagy house.

However, after the existing Masters’ Houses were restored in 1992, the flaws became all the more apparent. After several projects by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation on the issue of “updating modernism” and several architectural competitions, it was not only the city – as the owner of the estate at the time
owner of the estate at the time – that the entire artists’ colony could only be visualized in a way that was compatible with the preservation order if the building lines and cubatures of the destroyed buildings were also restored.

On May 16, Federal President Joachim Gauck opened the “repaired estate”, which now once again consists of the house of director Walter Gropius and the three semi-detached houses Moholy-Nagy/Feininger, Muche/Schlemmer and Klee/Kandinsky.

The two new houses correspond exactly to the old ones in terms of their external dimensions, the arrangement of the structures and the position of the windows. However, with “built blurs”, as the Berlin architects Bruno Fioretti Marquez describe their way of repairing the Meisterhaus estate as a total work of art. Seen from the outside, this means that any view through the gray window surfaces is denied. The houses appear almost ghostly and a little unreal. Inside, the principle of “built blurriness” continues elegantly and effortlessly. The historical position of ceilings, walls and staircases was taken as a model, but parts of the ceilings and walls were omitted. In this way, completely new views, rooms and balconies were created in the dimensions of the original layout, which seem far removed from the intimacy of the neighboring, originally preserved residential buildings and yet are closely related to them. Uta Baier
You can read a detailed review of the reconstructed Dessau master houses in issue 07.2014.