Bauhaus

The Bauhaus will celebrate its centenary in 2019. It was founded in Weimar in 1919 and moved to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin in 1932, where it was shut down by the Nazis in 1933. Designed by Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus building in Dessau was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 and now houses the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. The art school and its teachers exerted such wide-ranging influence that the term "Bauhaus" is often used as virtually synonymous with modernism in architecture and design.

When Stefan Berg (b. Bielefeld, 1971; lives and works in Berlin) taught photography at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau, he seized the opportunity to take photographs of the building's facades and interiors. The principal interest guiding his lens was to render the structure's graphical and design qualities so as to convey a vivid experience of the Bauhaus idea. Berg's pictures illustrate how the asymmetrical outward aspect of the cubic volumes gives way to symmetry inside the building and how light filtering in melds exterior and interior spaces. Evoking a sense of the building's atmospheres, they leave a powerful aesthetic impression.

With essays by Wiebke Loeper and Harald Theiss.