Addition to “Museo delle cappelle Medicee”, Florence (I)
Competition, 2018. In collaboration with Arch . Edoardo Ercolani
© Andrea Contursi,2018
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Street level (Museum exit)
Bauantrag easy
Der Bauantrag für dein Haus in 10 Stichpunkten einfach erklärt
ohne Geld und Zeit zu verschwenden.
Manchmal erfordert die Suche nach einer Lösung für dein Haus viele Energie und Zeit. Neben den reinen Baukosten machen die Ausgaben für Fachplaner und Bürokratie Sorgen. Ich werde dir zunächst in 10 Stichpunkten erklären alles wesentliches was es zum Thema Bauantrag zu wissen gibt. Hier Checkliste als pdf zu unterladen (kostenlos)
Here´s the flyer to the presentation of my book February the 14th at “Mondo Aperto”, Zugweg 22, 50677 Cologne (U: Bonner Straße).
My visit of the new Bauhaus-Museum in Weimar, 10.04.19
Aerial view of the area. In the center the big complex of the former “Gauforum” (1937) with the former parade square in the middle. The small rectangle in the left corner below is the new Bauhaus Museum (o. 2019). On the right the former assembly hall, nowadays used as department store. Let’s start a short photographical trip as backbone for a discourse on the evolution of architectural language and its ideological implications
Here the new Bauhaus-Museum in Weimar. Beside it one of the buildings of the “Gauforum”, dating back to the time of NS-dictatorship.
Like in most NS-buildings, representation crashes functionality. This is of course not the entrance of the new museum, but it looks almost the same.
The monumental over-scaled entrance of one of the Gauforum-building.
The former assembly hall of the “Gauforum” (on the left, currently beyond recognition) has been recently (ca. 2005) converted into a department store, which has no relationship, nor pedestrian connection with the former parade square (now the roof of underground parking). The current dominating approach of German modern planning culture is apparently not to solve contradictions, but rather to hide them beyond an uniforming fake skin.
View on the new Bauhaus museum from the former parade square. The new museum was supposed to adopt a “neutral” architectural language rather then a Bauhaus-like one. But as in politics “neutral” is insidious. So its entrance portal appears to be rather to continue the classical tradition accordingly to the Gauforum’s style, that one which Gropius and his fellows fought so vehemently at the time. Like the former assembly hall (now department store) you see the “neutral” exterior skin hiding the inner content (what about the Bauhaus approach to put interior processes into display?)
Albeit the landscaping around the museum is still largely incomplete, the proportional adjustment of the letter to the context is already evident.
The atmosphere of the entrance lobby is pleasant. But few days after is official opening the new museum is still rushed by huge masses of visitors.
Turning my backs to the Museum (there were too many people at the moment) , I walk to the former “Gauforum” again. But in the small exhibition on the NS-architecture inside no visitor can be seen all the time.
I finally manage after two hours to gain access to the Bauhaus-museum. The staircases connecting the different levels of the museum are somehow Zumthor-like, but they lack the atmospheric quality of Zumthor´s “processional” spaces and it has of course nothing to do with the historical Bauhaus architectural approach (But this was of course out of schedule).
The floor plan reveals the fire protection constraints (emergency routes in green), which strongly affect its layout. The compact form may have been dictated also by the necessity to reduce the total surface of the external envelope in order to reduce heating costs. Anyway you would expect from a Bauhaus-museum to have some more articulation of the various rooms or to look at least somehow more “relaxed”.
One of the few windows frames the view towards the Ettersberg hill, on whose top the Buchenwald Monument can be barely grasped in the background. This is a good view, but it would have been not so bad to have a little bit more of them elsewhere at the museum.
Permanent Exhibition, top floor : Mies van der Rohe section (on the left): plenty of objects. Hannes Meyer: nearly nothing (???). Is this supposed to be definitive?
The long staircase on the left side of the building works also as emergency exit but the upper part looks unexplainably dark.
View of the exterior from the park. More windows would have been no out of place here.
CONCLUSION: The new Bauhaus museum looks generally quite rigid and monolithic. Nor is it really “neutral” as it would pretend to be. The stone cladding has more to do with the tower of the Gauforum nearby , then with the tradition of modern architecture. As in the case the Berliner “Humboldsforum”, current official German design culture, reveals its inability to deal with a problematic past without betraying the basics of a contemporary approach.
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