The most striking element of the Bauhaus is the studio block, a four-storeyed glass box (Plate [161A]). This carried to its logical limit the implications of the near-curtain-wall of the Fagus Factory, quite as Mies had already proposed for his two glass skyscraper projects, but without their Expressionist planning. The bridge to the left of this block exploits the possibilities of great spans in ferro-concrete construction. Throughout that section and the block on the left ribbon-windows longer than Le Corbusier’s at Les Terrasses open up the walls just as Mies had already proposed to do in a notable project of 1922 for a ferro-concrete office building. A lower refectory wing links the glazed block with an apartment tower at the rear; in that the grouping of the horizontal windows with the many little projecting balconies clearly expresses the fact that this portion of the building is made up of small repeated dwelling units.
The organization of this very complex structure is asymmetrical but carefully studied (Figure [48]). Where Le Corbusier had thus far composed most of his houses inside a single ‘box’, Gropius here combined four or more. In each he emphasized visually the fact that the surface was but a thin shell enclosing an internal volume, but he varied the treatment according to the internal use of each portion of the building. At the same time regularity of rhythm, and often identity of measure in the parts, ordered the whole without recourse to symmetry or to the imposition of any such special system of proportion as Le Corbusier was enthusiastically developing.
Gropius did not again, until late in life in America, have such another architectural opportunity. In the following years, down to his departure from Germany with the rise of Hitler, his production was almost entirely in the field of low-cost housing. There he had the large-scale responsibilities largely denied to Le Corbusier until after the Second World War, but common enough by then in Germany.[[480]] First, in 1926-8, came the Törten Estate at Dessau consisting of terrace houses of concrete with smoothly rendered walls and horizontal windows. These were sound and economical but somewhat dull in design, the very reverse of Le Corbusier’s at Pessac. At the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927, moreover, Gropius’s free-standing houses did not rival Le Corbusier’s in quality of design, despite their considerable technical importance as early examples of something approaching total prefabrication.
Figure 48. Walter Gropius: Dessau, Bauhaus, 1925-6, plans
Gropius’s most finished works of the twenties were all at Dessau. Besides the Bauhaus itself, there is a small block of flats rising at the end of a row of one-storey shops to form the centre of the Törten Estate of 1928. But even more notable is the Dessau City Employment Office, begun the year before. Here Gropius rejected stucco rendering,[[481]] hitherto almost as much the sign manual of the new architecture in Germany as in France, and surfaced his walls with brick (Plate [161B]). The horizontal strips of window in the office wing, carefully related to the narrow bands of wall between and elegantly subdivided by light metal sash, are balanced with bold assurance against the tall vertical light of the stair tower at one end. Whether Gropius had learned from the Neoplasticists or the Constructivists, by this time he had become a master of abstract architectural composition in his own right.
Leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, Gropius next undertook a large housing estate, Dammerstock, at Karlsruhe. Here he combined terrace houses, somewhat ampler in size and less mechanically designed than those at Törten, with ranges of six-storey blocks of flats in the form of long, rigidly orientated slabs. Following this came the Siemensstadt Estate of 1930 outside Berlin (Plate [162A]). This is the classic example of housing in tall, thin slabs, prototype of innumerable similar estates to be built throughout the western world before and after the Second World War. In Germany, however, where the form was first adumbrated, their production ceased in 1933 with the onset of the Hitler regime—it has since been revived very actively, particularly by Ernst May at Hamburg and by architects of several countries in the Interbau exhibition of 1957 in Berlin.
Figure 49. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Project for brick country house, 1922, plan
Mies in the twenties was not nearly so prolific as Gropius, nor was he so widely influential. His Wolf house of 1926 at Guben and the Lange and Esters houses at Krefeld of 1926 and 1928, side by side in the Wilhelmshofallee, despite their fine dark brickwork[[482]] and the careful placing of the large horizontal windows, did not redeem the promise of an earlier project which he had made in 1922 for a country house; that was comparable in significance to his skyscraper schemes of the preceding years. Its plan seemed to represent the extension upward of a complex, but very rigid, geometrical pattern like those seen in Mondriaan’s and van Doesburg’s paintings of this period (Figure [49]). This sort of planning allowed a continuous flow of space in and around internal partitioning elements and out through wall-high glass areas to the surrounding terraces, themselves defined by the extension of the solid brick walls of the house. This openness more than rivalled, and was probably influenced by, the spatial flow in the Prairie Houses of Wright. Neoplasticist influence continued strong in Mies’s work as late as his Liebknecht-Luxemburg Monument in Berlin of 1926. This was an abstract rectangular block, ingeniously composed of various brick surfaces arranged in different planes. (It was, of course, destroyed under Hitler.)