The school changed everything from furniture to graphic design. But the Bauhaus’ biggest legacy is in architecture. We checked in on how that legacy has stood the test of time around the world.
Mar del Plata, Argentina
THE ARISTON CLUB
While visiting at the University of Buenos Aires in 1947, Marcel Breuer was asked to help design this social club on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
“The university invited Breuer to do a seminar, and Carlos Coire — another architect — said to him, ‘Why don’t you do a little building with me to be a magnet to bring people to this area?’,” said Hugo Kliczkowski-Juritz, an Argentine architect who lives in Madrid. “They were having lunch, and (Breuer) unfolded his napkin and drew the clover design on it immediately.”
The Ariston Club in Mar del Plata was once a thriving dance hall before being divided and converted into restaurants, then abandoned.
Kliczkowski-Juritz is now leading an online campaign for the building to be declared a heritage monument and restored. “People write to me and say, ‘Why are you doing this? For money?’ And I say, ‘No, it’s because I think a building like this needs to be rebuilt.’ You shouldn’t destroy history. It’s part of our identity.”
Baghdad
THE UNIVERSITY OF BAGHDAD
The idea of Walter Gropius — a German, and non-Muslim — designing a place of Islamic worship in Baghdad may seem surprising. But this mosque was just one part of a major commission to design and build an enhanced university campus in 1957, which came as Iraq found itself flush with oil wealth.
The country’s artists and architects were gravitating to Modernist ideals and many star Western architects found commissions as a result, said Ziad Jamaleddine, a specialist in Middle Eastern architectural history at Columbia University. (Gropius had some help in winning his commission: He had taught the son of Iraq’s then prime minister at Harvard.)
Only a handful of Gropius’ others buildings for the campus were ever completed, including a tower block for staff and a ceremonial arch. But his influence was more direct on those attending the college, too: He wrote the university’s architecture curriculum.
New Delhi
DELHI ZOOLOGICAL PARK
The Bauhaus’ role in the era following Indian independence is perhaps its most surprising architectural legacy. In the early 1940s, Habib Rahman won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was taught by a visiting Walter Gropius and later worked with Marcel Breuer.
Returning to India not long before it declared independence in 1947, Rahman found the simplicity and practicality of Gropius’ ideas perfect for a country that needed to build new institutions, quickly and cheaply. The Bauhaus’ love of cheap materials, such as concrete, helped, given the country’s lack of resources said Rahman’s son, Ram.
His father’s first building was a strikingly modern memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. It so impressed Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, that he invited Rahman to Delhi to design government buildings, apartments, the city’s first steel-framed skyscraper and even its zoo.
Like other Bauhaus buildings in India, the National Zoological Park, as it is now called, is in poor condition. The younger Rahman said he still only has positive memories of it.
Ile-Ife, Nigeria
OBAFEMI AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY
Arieh Sharon, an Israeli architect, only studied at the Bauhaus by accident. In 1926, while in Germany, he saw a magazine article about it and booked a train ticket to Dessau, the east German city where the school was then based.
By 1948, he was the head of Israel’s National Planning Authority, but what he called the decisive challenge in his life occurred in 1960, when he was commissioned to build a new university in the Nigerian city of Ife.
The government’s vision was for a campus that showed Nigeria could move on from British rule. Sharon ensured it was a project specific to its location, not a thoughtless building dropped into the landscape, said Cordelia Osasona, a professor of architecture history at the university. Several buildings are shaped like upside-down pyramids, so the lower floors are shaded from the sun and rain. He also tapped into the mythology of the Yoruba, the ethnic group that dominates this part of Nigeria.
Cordelia Osasona, professor of architecture history, said, “We pride ourselves on having Africa’s most beautiful campus. Our school anthem even refers to it: ‘Great Ife, Great Ife, Africa’s most beautiful campus.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.