Publisher: Spector Books, ISBN: 9783944669731, Authors: Torsten Blume, Regina Bittner, Boris Friedewald, Monika Markgraf, Format: Hardcover, 352pp, 190 x 280mm
The Master's Houses in Dessau, Germany, were once briefly home to some of the Bauhaus group's most influential protagonists, including Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and none other than Gropius himself. When Dessau was bombed in early 1945, both the Director’s House and Moholy-Nagy’s Master House were reduced to rubble.
After several of the Dessau Masters’ Houses – designed originally as an artists’ colony – were restored in the 1990s, a debate began on the reconstruction of the two houses destroyed in the war.
In 2010, after consultation with the British star architect David Chipperfield, the decision was made to recreate the Master Houses of Gropius and Moholy-Nagy following a contemporary interpretation, rather than rebuilding them 1:1. The two houses have now been reconstructed on the basis of designs by the Berlin firm Bruno-Fioretti-Marquez, as innovative reductions and abstractions of the original houses.
This volume describes the chequered history of the Dessau Masters’ Houses, presenting the reconstructed buildings for the first time in book form, with photographs by Armin Linke and Heidi Specker.