Foundation stone ceremony

The foundation stone ceremony for the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau will be held on the “Bauhaus Building 90th Anniversary” celebratory weekend on Sunday, December 4, 2016—one year after the decision was made in an open, international architecture competition for the design of the museum for González Hinz Zabala as the winner from among more than 800 entries.

A black box for the historic collection and an open stage for contemporary discourse
In December 2015, the decision was made to award the design of the new Bauhaus Museum Dessau to the young Spanish architects González Hinz Zabala of Barcelona. The competition jury was convinced by their concept of the museum as a glass shell accommodating a “Black Box” for the Bauhaus Collection on the upper story and an open-plan ground floor.

The Bauhaus Museum Dessau is scheduled for completion by the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus foundation in 2019. It will be built in order to publicly display the huge collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (SBD), whose 40,000 exhibits make it the second-largest Bauhaus Collection in the world. The builder-owner is SBD, represented by its director Dr. Claudia Perren. Now, one year after the award decision, the preliminary and conceptual design have been completed and a building application filed with the city of Dessau-Roßlau.

The “Black Box,“ soaring as a hermetic spatial structure within the glass envelope is reserved for presenting the collection, as well as custody and care. Its counterpart is the transparent ground floor with a highly flexible spade concept, very much like an “open stage“ which provides a variety of staging areas for present-day positions with the declared intent of reaching out into the surrounding park and the urban space. 

Claudia Perren, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation director, is convinced of the dual structure of the museum. She said: “We succeeded, in collaboration with the architects, to further densify the museum concept in the process. The approach by González Hinz Zabala—to envision the Bauhaus Museum Dessau as an interplay between a hermetic spatial structure and an open-plan ground floor—now appears even more convincing, also because in this planning effort the complex was given more of an aesthetic workshop character. This does not only correspond to the Bauhaus idea but also reflects the professional identity of the young generation of architects: a shift away from representation and a move towards an interactive edifice with room for experiment. I am positive that the Bauhaus Museum Dessau will become a very vibrant and open place.” 

The foundation stone ceremony on Sunday, December 4, 2016, will be attended by the funding bodies. The State of Saxony-Anhalt will be represented by Minister President Dr. Reiner Haseloff and the German Federal Government by Dr. Sigrid Bias-Engels, Group Leader K 2 with the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Dessau-Roßlau’s Mayor, Peter Kuras, will hand over the building plot to the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation during the official ceremony.