German architect Heike Hanada-designed new Bauhaus Museum has been opened in Weimar, home of the legendary school of art and design founded by Walter Gropius a hundred years ago. The opening of the museum also coincides with Germany’s celebrations of the centenary of the Bauhaus.

The museum, named Bauhaus Museum Weimar, will be a venue of open discussion, experimentation and sensory experience. With a focus on the early phase of the most influential school of art and design of the 20th century, the exhibition presents the treasures of the world’s oldest Bauhaus collection for the first time in such depth and scope. 

Heike Hanada designed a minimalistic, cube-shaped museum with its impressive night-time illumination presents the collection and its relevance to contemporary society on five levels comprising 2,000 square meters of exhibition space. 

Based on the Walter Gropius’s question "How do we want to live together?", the museum highlights the history of the Bauhaus to explore issues related to the design of our living environment today and in the future.

After many years of planning and building, the moment has finally arrived: the completion of a building with a striking urbanistic presence. The museum is reduced to a clearly defined, geometric form. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. 

The connection between the city and the park was very important to me, for the museum is defined by its function in the public sphere. This is mirrored by the design concept which features two-storey open spaces and cascading stairs which invite one to stroll and linger.’

The decision to locate the museum north of downtown on the edge of the Weimarhalle park and in the vicinity of the Nazi-era 'Gauforum' provides the Bauhaus Museum and its exhibition with decisive references to events and developments spanning the entire 20th century.

"The Bauhaus Museum will be the centrepiece of the newly emerging quarter of modernism in Weimar," added Mayor of Weimar Peter Kleine. 

"At this infrastructurally and historically prominent location, the museum will vitally connect the area between Theaterplatz, Goetheplatz, Nordvorstadt and the Bahnhofsviertel. Visitors will be able to experience the full breadth of cultural developments spanning the 19th century to the ambivalent events of modernism up to the present day."

"The quarter not only reveals a new dimension of Weimar’s cultural identity, but also promises to generate new economic perspectives. And that’s why we especially look forward to the many additional guests who will be visiting our city in the decades to come," Kleine added.

With the new Bauhaus Museum, Klassik Stiftung Weimar hopes to convey the pioneering spirit of the early Bauhaus years, to help further the understanding of its ideas, experiments and methods, and in so doing, position the Bauhaus firmly in the 21st century.

Image © André Kühn

Project facts

Architect: Heike Hanada
Contractor: Klassik Stiftung Weimar
Exhibition design: Holzer Kobler Architekturen
Media installations: Studio The Green Eyl

Al images © Andrew Alberts / Heike Hanada Laboratory of art and architecture, unless otherwise stated.

> via Bauhaus Museum Weimar