..."Herr Mies van der Rohe proposed to close Bauhaus... 1 With this sober protocol dated July 20th 1933, but referring to a meeting held on July 19th 1933, the closing of Bauhaus Berlin, and so the end of the Bauhaus story, is formally confirmed...
...Herewith we inform the directors of the Hochschule für bildende Kunst that the Provisional Republican Government has approved the request to rename the unified Hochschule für bildende Kunst and Kunstgewerbeschule as "Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar"1 With this succinct letter from the Office of the Hofmarschallamt in Weimar on 12th April 1919, Bauhaus formally existed... 4 On April 1st 1919 Gropius formally signed a contract with the Office of the Hofmarschallamt in Weimar appointing him Director of the new unified institution, an institution which received its new name on April 12th, and shortly afterwards Walter Gropius published his "Bauhaus Manifesto"...
...In addition the exhibition took place in context of the the so-called "Formalism Debate" A subject for a post in its own right and not something we want to dwell too long on here, the East German Formalism Debate can be briefly summarised as: After initial acceptance of ex-Bauhaus students and their modernist ilk, in July 1950 the East German authorities denounced formalism as "alienated and hostile" towards the German Volk, and a "weapon of imperialism"3 Or to paraphrase: Western, capitalist, decadent... During the debate to the motion, amongst other similar opinions, the views were expressed that "In terms of architecture, which has an important role to play in our Five Year Plan, we are mainly hindered in our attempts to develop an architecture that express the new social conditions in the German Democratic Republic by the so-called "Bauhaus Style" and the constructivist, functionalist world view of many architects", and that, "the production of earthenware and china is neither artistic not practical and doesn't meet the justified demands that our Volk place in such products"5 In addition to general criticisms, Mart Stam, at the time rector of the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and previously rector in Dresden, in which capacity he had personally mentored many of the students as they developed the projects on show in the Leipzig exhibition, was also personally attacked...
...And had they not, what would remain today from the legacy of Bauhaus, Weissenhofsiedlung, et al...
