Walter Gropius' daring but doomed 'Bauhaus in the trees'
John Blau
July 2, 2019
The Bauhaus mastermind was 85 years old when he agreed to design a new residency for the German ambassador in Buenos Aires. It was one of his last projects and among his best. The only problem — it never got built.
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Walter Gropius in Argentina: A final adventure
"Potentially the most beautiful building to come out of the design leadership of the late Professor Gropius," was how one colleague described plans for a German ambassador residence in Buenos Aires that never was.
Image: Archivo Williams
Great design, poor timing
The star architect and his team at The Architects Collaborative (TAC) designed an elevated residence for the German ambassador to Argentina in the late 1960s. It was one of the last projects undertaken by the then-85-year-old Bauhaus mastermind and, by some accounts, one of his best. A military coup delayed the project, and a new German ambassador with different taste later killed it.
Image: Archivo Williams
A tree house of a special kind
Earlier designs by TAC architects drew criticism from authorities in Buenos Aires. They were worried about the building blocking the view of the surrounding wooded park. Argentine collaborator, Amancio Williams, suggested a structure with an elevated residence and subterranean reception and administrative area. "Put the house in the trees," Gropius told his colleague, William Roesner.
Image: Archivo Williams
Where is the missing model?
TAC built an elaborate model of the ambassador's residence for presentation purposes. This was in the day when expensive models were made to show clients what they were buying. The model was featured later at a travelling Bauhaus exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1970. It was destined for the Bauhaus Archiv but vanished along the way. Former TAC architect William Roesner is still looking for it.
Image: Archivo Williams
Lots of changes, lots of drawing
Immediately after joining TAC in December 1968, Roesner was assigned to work hand in hand with Gropius on the ambassador’s residence project. It was a process of continuous tweaking and drawing new designs, like this aerial view, which was eventually accepted. "Gropius was always gentlemanly and kind, not especially critical nor complimentary for that matter," recalls Roesner.
Image: Archivo Williams
What it could have been
Alexander Cvijanovic, a senior TAC architect, would later claim the ambassador's residence to be "potentially the most beautiful building to come out of the design leadership of the late Professor Gropius." Roesner agrees: "This would have been an exceptional building for Gropius — a house in the trees." But it wasn't meant to be.
Image: William Roesner
A good run at TAC
Roesner worked only six months with Gropius before the Bauhaus founder died in July 1969. The picture of Gropius with the rose and hat (upper right, back) was taken at his 85th birthday party at Harvard, just months before Roesner joined TAC. The photo of Gropius with Roesner in front (r) was taken at the Gropius House estate, where this year's annual gathering of TAC architects was held.
Image: John Blau
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The little-known story about the Argentine residence is an intricate one, complete with political intrigue and abandoned designs. It also offers a glimpse of how rigorously the Bauhaus "master of collaboration" Walter Gropius worked right up to his death, how unafraid he was to use other people's ideas and drafting skills as part of his teamwork methodology, and why, despite a major professional shortcoming — his inability to draw — he is considered one of the greatest architects of modern times.
After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1934 because of his "un-German" work and spending three years in Britain, Gropius went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was offered to chair Harvard's Graduate School of Design. The move would shape the trajectory of modern architecture in the US. Later, at the age of 63, he joined The Architects Collaborative (TAC), an architecture firm adjacent to the campus.
Gropius' impact on both institutions bore the stamp of his Bauhaus past — the revolutionary, multidisciplinary school he established after the First World War as an original contribution to modernism, and the developing International Style of architecture.
It's an architectural legacy which, in addition to the centennial of the Bauhaus school's founding, is being celebrated at Harvard throughout July with a series of lectures and a presentation of nearly 200 works by 74 artists. The series also touches on some of Gropius' other grand architectural projects.
In December 1968, William Roesner, a resident architect and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), joined TAC, one of the top addresses for architects in the US at the time. In collaboration with Gropius, he was immediately put to work on a design for a German ambassador residency in the Argentine capital.
But there were problems. The German government's plan to build the new residence at Plaza Alemania faced growing resistance from the Buenos Aires mayor and city council members, who were worried about a large structure obstructing the view of the surrounding wooded park. Roesner's task was to come up with a low-visibility design, following the efforts of a colleague whose designs were shelved for being too prominent and obstructive.
His initial draft of a green-roofed subterranean facility with lightwells drew a tepid response from Gropius. "We don't want a bunker," the maestro told Roesner politely, in the deep German accent he maintained throughout life. "We need to put the house in the trees."
Yet it was Argentine politics, not design philosophy, that increasingly preoccupied Gropius and ultimately threatened the project. And what the battle-worn architect didn't need so late in life was more politics.
Artists or rebels: What's left of Bauhaus?
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The problem dated back to 1964 when German President Heinrich Lübcke and Argentinian President Arturo Illia agreed to swap a small mansion owned by the German government for a larger, more representative site at Plaza Alemania in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. Two years later, however, Illia was ousted by General Juan Carlos Onganía in a military coup, and the residence plans were put on hold.
Busy in Baghdad
Amid the political upheaval, the Argentine architect Amancio Williams approached Gropius about partnering on the residency, believing the collaboration would improve his chance of winning the contract. Gropius declined, citing a heavy work load and extensive travel.
At the time, he was busy designing Baghdad University, in many ways his most ambitious project, and his Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin. Gropius' earlier experience with a military coup in Iraq may have triggered his reluctance as well.
Only after the German government approached him in 1968 did he agree to take the job, in collaboration with Williams. In November that year, Gropius and his close associate, Alexander Cvijanovic, spent two weeks in Buenos Aires pouring over ideas for the residency with their Argentine collaborator.
Back at the drawing board, Roesner began designing a structure with the living quarters perched on 16 slender 10-meter pillars, and the reception facility tucked below ground level to offer an extended view of the park. It was a process of continuous tweaks. Gropius would meet Roesner at his desk for 10-to-15-minute consultations about once a week over a four-month period.
"I would jump up, he would take my seat and I would stand on his left side," Roesner recalls. "He usually had a cigar, and I can remember standing in clouds of smoke as he pointed with his finger at the changes he wanted. He verbalized his ideas; there was never any doodling."
'I cannot draw a straight line'
Which brings us to Gropius' limited drawing skills. That weakness already worried him while working alongside Mies van der Rohe und later Le Corbusier in his first job in the Berlin office of pioneering modernist architect, Peter Behrens.
In a letter to his mother Meldina, which Gropius gave to his biographer Reginald Isaacs, he wrote: "My total inability to draw the simplest thing on paper is very discouraging and I often look with sorrow on my future profession. I cannot draw a straight line."
Perhaps out of necessity, he relied early in his career on collaboration, which he then elevated to an art form. It became the running theme of a man of ideas who didn't always have the means to deliver.
"Everybody wants to think of him as one of the world's great designers, but he wasn't. He was one of the world's great [design] philosophers," Sally Harkness, a co-founding partner at TAC, once commented.
Gropius liked Roesner's new sketch but insisted on two substantial changes: four large L-shaped pillars instead of multiple thin columns, and a fascia on the below-ground portion of the building.
"L-shaped columns were an aesthetic call, reflecting the architectural trend toward brutalism at that time. I wanted a more elegant, structural expression," Roesner recalled.
The idea of putting the living quarters in the trees stemmed originally from Williams, who had designed an elevated house spanning a creek on a wooded lot for his father Alberto, a prominent musician and composer.
Dwindling momentum
The final design — a collaboration between Williams, Gropius and Roesner — generated buzz in the press and architect circles. But opposition to developing Plaza Alemania had grown even fiercer by that time. Momentum further dwindled with Gropius' sudden death in July 1969.
Williams lobbied intensively for the project to move ahead with Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, who became the new Argentinian president in 1971, and who had shown interest.
About a year later, however, the German government abandoned the plan, largely because the new German ambassador, Luitpold Werz, didn't like the elevated modern design.
That ended what Cvijanovic would later claim to be "potentially the most beautiful building to come out of the design leadership of the late Professor Gropius."
The exhibition "The Bauhaus and Harvard" runs through July 28, 2019 at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
10 essential facts about Bauhaus
Germany is launching the 100th anniversary of the influential school of design. Revisit the history and the ideas promoted by the Bauhaus.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
It started as an actual school
In 1919, Walter Gropius became the director of a new institution, the Staatliches Bauhaus, also simply known as the Bauhaus, which merged the former Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Even though Gropius was an architect and the term Bauhaus literally translates as "construction house," the school of design did not have an architecture department until 1927.
Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo
It was against the arts' class snobbery
In a pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition, Gropius stated that his goal was "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Combining influences from modernism, the English Arts and Crafts movement, and Constructivism, Gropius promoted the idea that design was to serve the community.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
It proved that the functional needn't be boring
The most basic principle of the movement of the Bauhaus school was "form follows function." According to this idea, simple but elegant geometric shapes were designed based on the intended function or purpose of a building or an object. Illustrating this concept, the pieces of this chess game designed by Josef Hartwig (1923-24) are stylized to suggest how each of them moves and its rank of power.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/O.Berg
It promoted the idea of the 'total work of art'
The interdisciplinary approach of the school's professors and students meant that visual arts, graphic design, architecture as well as product and furniture design all came into conversation with how people lived in the modern world. They thereby actualized the concept of the "Gesamtkunstwerk," or complete work of art. This photo shows the interior of the Bauhaus school in Dessau.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
It included several influential artists
The school had many major artists among its teachers. This photo from 1926 features, from left to right, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer. Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were also directors of the school.
Image: picture-alliance/akg-images
Bauhaus artists held legendary costume parties
Although the Bauhaus is associated with minimalist design, students and teachers invested an unsuspected amount of energy in creating surreal costumes for parties, as reported by Farkas Molnar in his 1925 essay, "Life at the Bauhaus." The parties began as improvised events but were later turned into large-scale productions, such as Oskar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet" from 1922 (photo).
Image: Getty Images/P. Macdiarmid
The institution closed several times
Political tensions led to different closures of the school. After being based in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau (picture). When the Nazis gained control of the city council there, the school closed again in 1932 and was reopened in Berlin. It was closed permanently in April 1933, pressured by the Nazi regime, which criticized the institution for producing "degenerate art."
Image: picture alliance/dpa/J. Wolf
Its ideals nevertheless spread worldwide
Even though the Bauhaus school was closed, different members of its staff kept spreading its idealistic concepts after they fled Germany. For example, many Jewish architects of the Bauhaus school contributed to the White City of Tel Aviv (picture), where a collection of 4,000 buildings were designed in the Bauhaus style. It is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Grimm
It still influences designers today
Though today people might most commonly associate modern, affordable, modular furniture with Ikea, the concept wasn't born in Sweden, but rather inspired by the classic works of Bauhaus designers. This photo shows tubular furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930.
Image: picture-alliance/ dpa
Germany launches its 2019 Bauhaus centenary
The Bauhaus school turns 100 in 2019. Germany's major celebratory program involves not only the three museums housed in the former schools in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin (picture), but also at least 10 of the country's 16 federal states will participate. Expect several exhibitions, events, publications — and even new museums.