smow blog compact: bauhaus re use @ Bauhaus Archiv Berlin

Given that Bauhaus is often perceived as having been an incubator for the creative talents of the 1920s, it is perhaps fitting that windows salvaged from Bauhaus Dessau should have been upcycled into a greenhouse for the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin.

Or at least into a greenhouse-esque structure for the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin.

Conceived, planned and realised by Berlin architectural practice zukunftsgeraeusche GbR together with the Bauhaus Archiv Berlin, Technischen Universität Berlin and Wagner Tragwerke with the assistance of the Oberstufenzentrum Knobelsdorff-Schule Berlin, the new bauhaus re use pavilion is intended as a temporary event location and home for the museum’s programme of educational activities until the completion of the institution’s much heralded, and desperately needed, extension – a project which all involved hope will be completed in time for the Bauhaus centenary in 2019.

In addition to the salvaged Dessau windows and doors the new Berlin bauhaus re use pavilion is constructed from a reduced steel skeleton and comes equipped with two sea containers which serve as storage and toilets/wash facilities. Making intelligent use of a nice double wall construction principle for insulation the bauhaus re use pavilion is a delightful example of a technology light construction which not only saves energy through the re-use of existing resources but which for its daily operation has only limited resource requirements.

While there is admittedly nothing particularly novel in the construction of a building from salvaged windows, a particularly fine example can be found some 125 kms south of Berlin in the form of Niek Wagemans’ WunderBAR in the courtyard of the Ampelhaus in Oranienbaum, there is something especially fitting, almost ancestrally correct, about the use of salvaged windows from Bauhaus Dessau for a Bauhaus pavilion in Berlin given that, in essence, Gropius’s Bauhaus Dessau is in itself little more than windows. And that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Bauhaus Berlin was a reduced and reworked version of Bauhaus Dessau which, albeit unintentionally, was also but a fleeting, short-lived, institution

All in all a delightful and worthy addition to the Bauhaus Archiv ensemble.

The new bauhaus re use Pavilion can be viewed 24/7 in the grounds of the Bauhaus Archiv, Klingelhöferstrasse 14, 10785 Berlin and full information on the pavilion and the programme of events therein can be found at www.bauhaus.de