The Bauhaus School, Dessau, Germany. Image courtesy of Flickr.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has announced plans to build a major museum honoring the Bauhaus School in Dessau, Germany. Founded by the modernist architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus stands as one of most influential design schools in modern history.

Gropius established the Bauhaus School in the city of Weimar, Germany, with a singular mission -- to “reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts.” In Gropius’ manifesto, Proclamation of the Bauhaus, he explains his vision for reversing the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity and design. Gropius established the Bauhaus School and developed a craft-based curriculum to educate and train artisans and designers, giving them the tools needed to create functional and beautiful objects for the rapidly-modernizing world. In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school. The structure boasts many features that quickly became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan. After the Bauhaus closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi party, the school’s students and teachers, including Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers, dispersed, bringing the movement’s groundbreaking teachings and pared-down aesthetic to a wider audience.

Located in Dessau City Park, the forthcoming Bauhaus Museum will open in 2019 -- just in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the school. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the city of Dessau-Roblau have launched a two-stage architecture competition to determine who will design the museum. As part of the competition’s first stage, the foundation has invited architects to submit proposals through April 13, 2015. A jury will then select thirty finalists, who will be evaluated by the foundation. The winning submission will be announced by the end of the year. Funding for the $28-million museum will come from the State of Saxony as well as the federal German government. The museum will house a permanent collection of nearly 40,000 Bauhaus objects -- the world’s second largest collection of Bauhaus heritage material.

Established in 1994, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has become an important institution for research of Bauhaus history and for the present day’s design discourse. According to Dr. Claudia Perren, the Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, “In Dessau, what will be created is a ‘museum in motion’ that, with a dynamic exhibition and outreach concept, shows treasures from the collection as well as current positions in ever new spatial and conceptual contexts. The Bauhaus in Dessau has an avant-garde tradition, which we will continue with the profile of the new museum.”