The school changed everything from furniture to graphic design. But the Bauhaus’s biggest legacy is in architecture. Here’s where that legacy stands in
Argentina, Nigeria, Israel, Australia, Iraq, the United States and India.
Mar del Plata, Argentina
The Ariston Club
Designed by Marcel Breuer and others, including Carlos Coire in 1947.
While in the country teaching a seminar at the University of Buenos Aires, Marcel Breuer was asked to help design a social club for a beach resort on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
Now derelict, the Ariston Club in Mar del Plata, some 250 miles south of Buenos Aires, was once a thriving dance hall. A place for lunch overlooking the sea and fun at night, it once had a revolving dance floor and partiers would throw down talcum powder to get a better grip when barefoot, said Sol Marinucci of Trimarchi, a group that organizes a design festival there.
Hugo Kliczkowski-Juritz, an Argentine architect who lives in Madrid, first saw the building as a child. Its architectural importance only became clear to him in later life, long after the building had been divided and converted into restaurants, then left unoccupied.
“The university invited Breuer to do a seminar, and Carlos Coire — another architect — said to him, ‘Why don’t you do a little building with me to be a magnet to bring people to this area?’,” Mr. Kliczkowski-Juritz said. “They were having lunch, and [Breuer] unfolded his napkin and drew the clover design on it immediately.”
Mr. Kliczkowski-Juritz is now leading an online campaign for the building to be declared a heritage monument and restored. “People write to me and say, ‘Why are you doing this? For money?’ And I say, ‘No, it’s because I think a building like this needs to be rebuilt.’ You shouldn’t destroy history. It’s part of our identity.”
Hugo Kliczkowski-Juritz, an Argentine architect
“It’s not Breuer’s best building, but it’s his only one in South America.”
Hugo Kliczkowski-Juritz
“There’s been a lot of vandalism — people go inside and start fires. The building is in a clover shape and the concrete is there, but all the windows, everything else, is destroyed.”
Ile-Ife, Nigeria
Obafemi Awolowo University
Design led by Arieh Sharon, built over 18 years beginning in the early 1960s.
Arieh Sharon, an Israeli architect, only studied at the Bauhaus by accident. In 1926, while in Germany, he saw a magazine article about it and on a whim booked a train ticket to Dessau, the east German city where the school was then based.
Five years later, he returned to what was then Palestine, and the simple whitewashed buildings he designed there helped give the expanding city of Tel Aviv a global architectural reputation.
By 1948, he was the head of Israel’s National Planning Authority, but the “decisive challenge” in his life, as he wrote, occurred in 1960 some 4,000 miles away in Nigeria, when he was commissioned by a local government and an Israeli firm to build a new university in the city of Ife.
The government’s vision was for a campus that showed Nigeria could move on from British rule. Sharon ensured it was a project for its location, not a thoughtless building dropped into the landscape, said Cordelia Osasona, a professor of architecture history at the university. Several buildings are shaped like upside-down pyramids, so the lower floors are shaded from the sun and rain. He made sure the natural air-flow is always maximized, keeping people in the buildings cool.
He also tapped into mythology of the Yoruba, the ethnic group that dominates this part of Nigeria. An obelisk on campus echoes the Oranmiyan Staff, a tall stone monument with metal studs in Ile-Ife city, which commemorates the death of a legendary Yoruba king.
Cordelia Osasona, professor of architecture history
“We pride ourselves on having Africa’s most beautiful campus. Our school anthem even refers to it: ‘Great Ife, Great Ife, Africa’s most beautiful campus.’”
Cordelia Osasona
“[Sharon] wasn’t replicating the Bauhaus. Rather, he tropicalized and contextualized it. He drew inspiration from the climate and the setting, and the Yoruba culture.”
Tel Yosef, Israel
Dining Hall, Kibbutz Tel Yosef
Designed by Leopold Krakauer in 1935.
Leopold Krakauer didn’t study at the Bauhaus. But that doesn’t matter when looking at the school’s influence in Israel, said Zvi Efrat, an architect and historian.
Modern architecture was seen as “degenerate art” in Germany in the 1930s. Jewish architects in Palestine (now Israel), whether they had been to the Bauhaus or not, were working in a similar style, “taking what the Nazis said is bad and making it good,” said Mr. Efrat.
Kibbutz dining halls are the best examples of this new architecture in Israel, not only because of the design, but also the communal values they represent. Members would meet there to eat, celebrate and vote on how the kibbutz should be run.
They would even vote on the design of such buildings, although the main consideration was just that they fit every kibbutz member at once. The dining hall at Kibbutz Tel Yosef features two squares set askew on top of each other, which produces a series of striking balconies that the whole kibbutz could gather on for celebrations.
Krakauer’s dining hall was seen as such an important piece of architecture that it appeared on a set of commemorative stamps celebrating great Israeli buildings. But despite that architectural worth, today it’s empty. Kibbutz members eat at home, said Orit Zur, of the kibbutz’s archives department.
Zvi Efrat, an architect and historian
“There is a sudden change and everything becomes Modernist, even the cowsheds in the kibbutz.”
Zvi Efrat
“The Bauhaus is about participation, sharing and communal thinking. It’s utopian in a sense: an attempt to create a better society. The kibbutz is too.”
Penrith, Australia
The Torin Building
Designed by Marcel Breuer and completed in 1976.
Rufus and Leslie Stillman lived in Litchfield, Conn., a picturesque village filled with colonial architecture. But the pair became architectural provocateurs when they commissioned Breuer to design them a Modernist home.
Mr. Stillman also commissioned Breuer to build offices and factories for his global company, the Torin Corporation, which made parts for heaters and air conditioning units. His stark buildings popped up in Rochester, Indiana and England, among other locations. The last was in Penrith, Australia. It is Breuer’s only building in the country.
Built for only about $5 million at the time, it was “really overengineered,” said the building’s current owner, Warren Peffer.
He meant it as a compliment. The building has features you would not expect from the 1970s, such as a sprinkler system, with a back-up pump in case the first failed.
Mr. Peffer did not know anything about the architecture — described as “Egyptian” by the Australian Institute of Architects — when he bought it last year. But the building had everything his company needed, and will last decades. “It’ll see me out,” he said.
Luke Jackson, who sold the building to Mr. Peffer
“As you walk into the foyer there’s this big staircase with these stone steps and it’s lined with concrete that’s been patterned to look like timber. It looks so grand.”
Luke Jackson
“We had museums and architecture firms interested and we had industrial and warehouse firms. I think it’s good it went to Warren. It was built for manufacturing so it’s good it’s still doing that.”
Baghdad
University of Baghdad
Walter Gropius designed a mosque as part of a commission for a new university campus in 1957.
The idea of Walter Gropius — a German, and non-Muslim — designing a place of Islamic worship in Baghdad may seem surprising.
Gropius’s design involved a dome supported by three arches rather than having walls like a typical mosque, said Hisham Ashkouri, an architect who trained at the university. “So you can walk into it from any side,” he said. “It’s actually the best design of a mosque I’ve ever seen.”
The mosque was just one part of a major commission to design and build an enhanced campus, which came as Iraq found itself flush with oil wealth. The country’s artists and architects were gravitating to Modernist ideals and many star Western architects found commissions as a result, said Ziad Jamaleddine, a specialist in Middle Eastern architectural history at Columbia University.
Gropius had some help in winning his commission: He had taught the son of Iraq’s then prime minister at Harvard. Local architects were always involved on these projects, Mr. Jamaleddine added. It was far from Westerners coming in and imposing their ideas.
Only a handful of Groupius’s others buildings for the campus were ever completed including a tower block for staff and a ceremonial arch. But the buildings were “like a model for us young students,” Mr. Ashkouri said. Gropius’s influence was more direct on those attending the college too: He wrote the university’s architecture curriculum.
Hisham Ashkouri, an architect who trained at the university
“Gropius designed all the buildings without air conditioning. He ventilated them by letting the air flow through the buildings, and he would give the walls and the roofs two layers so the inner was in the shade all the time. It was the most ingenious design for the climate.”
Hisham Ashkouri
“It’s welcoming, it calls people to come and pray, or whatever. That’s really the whole point of a mosque. I’m sure Walter Gropius studied the Islamic religion before designing it. That’s the sort of person he was.”
Pittsburgh
The Alan I.W. Frank House
Home designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, completed in 1940.
Alan I.W. Frank, 87, should know what it’s like to live in a Bauhaus property better than anyone. He’s lived in one almost his whole life.
In 1937, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer arrived in the United States and began teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. The following year, Mr. Frank’s father, Robert, the owner of a steel firm, heard Mr. Gropius lecture about his ideas for a new architecture and found it so inspiring, he commissioned the pair to build a family home.
During its construction, Alan Frank, not even 10 years old, wandered the building site and peppered the architects with questions about what was being built. “They were both very cordial,” Mr. Frank recalled.
Breuer did not just design the home, but every fitting and piece of furniture in it, so every chair and doorknob is unique to the property.
Breuer is perhaps most remembered today for the chairs he designed at the Bauhaus built from single pieces of tubular steel bent into shape, with leather straps slung across them for seats. They are still sold today.
According to a 1941 review of the property in the magazine Architectural Forum, the Frank house was “evidence that contemporary architecture is entering a new phase: Richer, more assured and more human.” But Breuer and Gropius split as a professional team in 1941, and few other properties like it were built.
Alan I.W. Frank, owner
“A lot of people think Bauhaus buildings are geometric and cold. But what they don’t understand is that some are such warm, happy places.”
Alan I.W. Frank
“My parents’ spirit is still here, but so is Gropius’s and Breuer’s. It’s more than a home to me. It’s alive with their life force.”
New Delhi
Delhi Zoological Park
Designed by Habib Rahman and completed in 1974.
The Bauhaus’s role in the era following Indian independence is perhaps its most surprising architectural legacy. In the early 1940s, Habib Rahman, a young Indian engineer, won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was taught by a visiting Walter Gropius. Gropius got him work with Marcel Breuer after he graduated.
Returning to India just before it declared independence in 1947, Mr. Rahman found the simplicity and practicality of Gropius’s ideas perfect for a country that needed to build new institutions, quickly and cheaply. The Bauhaus’s love of cheap materials, such as concrete, helped, given the countries lack of resources said Mr. Rahman’s son, Ram.
But his father’s buildings were not just concrete blocks, the younger Mr. Rahman insisted. They featured some decorative grills,which hint at India’s design traditions.
His first building was a strikingly modern memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. It so impressed Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, that he invited Mr. Rahman to Delhi to design government buildings, apartments, the city’s first steel-framed skyscraper and even its zoo.
The National Zoological Park, as it is now called, is in poor condition, like other Bauhaus buildings in India. Mr. Rahman, pictured below with his father and the architect Joseph Stein, said he still only has positive memories of it.
Varun Natrey, 19, zoo visitor
“This is my first time to the zoo. The architecture is all pretty much old, but it’s nice.”
Ram Rahman, Habib Rahman’s son
“My childhood was spent in the zoo. We would picnic there at night when it wasn’t open to the public. And when new animals were born, we’d go and see them and play with the tiger cubs.”
Miriam Quick contributed research from London.
Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario is based in Sydney, Australia; Bryan Denton is based in New Delhi, India; Andrew Ecebio is based in Simawa, Nigeria; Heidi Levine is based in Jerusalem; Sergey Ponomarev is based in Moscow; Hernan Zenteno is based in Buenos Aires.
Production by Gabriel Gianordoli and Rebecca Lieberman. Additional editing by Matthew Anderson, Alicia DeSantis, and Susanna Timmons.