Bauhaus Museum, Weimar

The Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, is a museum dedicated to the famous Bauhaus art school; designed by architect Heike Hanada, the museum opened on April 6, 2019.

Above, the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, exterior view; photo Thomas Müller, Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

The Bauhaus in Weimar (1919-1925)
The city of Weimar, in the German state of Thuringia, was the first location of the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 before it moved to Dessau in 1925 and finally to Berlin in 1932. At the time of the school’s foundation, Weimar was also the seat of the government of the so-called Weimar Republic (1919-1933).
Together with being a school, the Bauhaus was also an influential research center that profoundly innovated many creative fields including visual arts, graphic design, product design, fashion and costume design, stage design, and architecture.
Along with Gropius, notable teachers of the Weimar school included Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, László Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer, to name just a few.

Bauhaus Museum Weimar, a view of the permanent exhibition with designs by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; photo © Claus Bach ® Photography, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

The museum
Opened in 2019, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar is aimed to present the history and creations of the school. The collection of the museum comprises about 13,000 pieces – artifacts and documents – related to the Bauhaus, including original pieces of furniture by Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe; lamps, and home accessories designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Carl Jakob Jucker, and Marianne Brandt; and artworks by Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Lyonel Feininger.

Designed by German architect Heike Hanada, who won an architecture competition organized in 2012, the museum’s building is a box-shaped construction. The, rather severe, concrete-clad facades of the museum are graced by several horizontal grooves with LED strips that slightly illuminate the building at night and emphasize its geometry.

Internally, the museum is divided into five floors, three of which contain the 2,000-square-meter (21,500-square-foot) permanent exhibition which presents about 1,000 pieces from the collection, while the ground floor houses the entrance lobby and the basement accommodates a cafe and various visitor facilities.

Bauhaus Museum Weimar, exterior view from Stéphane-Hessel-Platz; photo © Claus Bach ® Photography.

East facade and detail of the facade cladding. The facades were originally intended to be clad with glass before a cost-cut plan forced the architects to use concrete panels; photos: Thomas Müller, and Alexander Burzik – Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

One of the rooms of the permanent exhibition; photo © Claus Bach ® Photography.

Marcel Breuer, Klubsessel B 3 Wassily / Club Chair B 3 Wassily, 1925; on permanent loan from the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung to Klassik Stiftung Weimar; photographer unknown, courtesy Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

All images courtesy of Klassik Stiftung Weimar.