The “School in the Woods” as a Socio-pedagogical Ideal

With the construction of the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau-Waldfrieden, near Berlin, the Swiss architect and second director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, was able to realize his ideal of how a modern building should be designed and built for the first time. Meyer had been awarded the commission on the basis of his design proposal prior to being appointed Bauhaus director: hence, the project planning for the school was done at Meyer’s private architecture office in Berlin rather than Bauhaus Dessau. Meyer’s collaborators on the project included Hans Wittwer, who Walter Gropius appointed alongside Meyer to develop a building theory class at the Bauhaus in 1927,¹ who had previously worked with Meyer as an architect in Switzerland, as well as several students from the building theory course itself. Among them were Arieh Sharon (draughtsman, project manager of the teachers’ residences), Antonin Urban (draughtsman), Hermann Bunzel (project manager for the school facilities), Wera Meyer-Waldeck (who worked as an interior design), Edmund Collein, Philipp Tolziner, Lotte Beese, and Konrad Püschel. Working under Meyer meant working within a collective whose projects were collaboratively planned and realized rather than attributed to named individuals.

As with the oft-cited “vertical brigades,” whose main purpose was to ensure the involvement of Bauhaus students from all of the school’s workshops, Meyer drew collaborators not only from the building theory course, but from every Bauhaus workshop (carpentry, weaving, metalwork), achieving an ideal balance of material and craft applications. Meyer’s was a holistic approach to architecture, making no distinction between masters and students, or site managers and skilled tradesmen. In fact, Meyer’s design process was uniquely suited to the ADGB school commission, being that the architect’s methods were predominantly socio-pedagogical in nature and the complex itself was intended for the pedagogical/leisure activities of participating union members, who could avail themselves to training courses at the school for one or two months. Meyer’s task was, in effect, to embody the democratic structure of the union itself in his design. The construction site in the woods of Bernau appeared ideal for this project. Although secluded, it was still fairly close to Berlin.

Hannes Meyer had the students of the Bauhaus building theory class draw up similar environmental analyses for initial project planning on the Trade Union School. On the planning application, these were situated next to the architectural plans so as to facilitate understanding. One plan showed the incidence of sunlight in the individual guest residences, as well as elaborating different furnishing options; another featured a diagram showing the incidence of sunlight in the classrooms and lecture rooms; a third was a study of the incidence of sunlight in the complex as a whole. Meyer and Wittwer planned the construction of the school complex on the basis of these studies, as a “sculptural interpretation” and “direct transcription from the functional diagrams.”² The resulting design was more or less Z-shaped, made of yellow brick, and built at various elevations aligned with the sloping terrain, subdivided into a communal area, residential blocks for boarders, and a school wing complete with gymnasium and library. A glass hallway built on an incline, which Meyer described in terms of function as aVerkehrsschlauch³ or transit corridor, linked the separate building groups. Paths between communal, living, and school areas were designed to open up the complex and to facilitate visitors becoming acquainted with one another as they walked between the residence halls and seminar rooms. In the four residential blocks for boarders, there was space for 120 visitors accommodated in twin rooms. All four blocks were assigned different colors, with variations in shade used to distinguish each of the three floors. Color coding served to aid orientation, give residents a sense of belonging, and also served as a basis to split visiting residents into teams for sporting activities, generously allocated for in the plan, with an open air swimming pool and an adjoining sports facility. Opposite the boarders’ rooms, each of which featured a large window, a small lake was dug amidst a group of pine trees; a soothing, sylvan view to enhance regeneration.

Based on the socio-pedagogical functions of the various building groups, Hannes Meyer’s collective designed the Trade Union School logically from the inside, the needs and ambulatory habits of the residents, out; the buildings’ shell. The individual buildings constitute functional units in themselves, with their arrangement resulting not from subjective formal rules of composition, but from their relationship to one another. The proposal for the site plan was also informed by the feedback and analysis of the building’s future users, the trade union members themselves. And in his arrangement of route paths, vistas, and open spaces, Meyer accomplished a completely new socio-pedagogical organization of communal life, manifested in the buildings and their disposition upon the site. Neither hierarchy nor authority were apparent: this was a democratic building both in form and function.

This shift in the way the Bauhaus understood architecture during Hannes Meyer’s period as director (1928–30) was harnessed by Walter Peterhans (head of the photography class founded at the Bauhaus in 1929), in his photographs of the Trade Union School, taken at Meyer’s behest. With the technical precision of the professional photographer, he perfectly staged the realization of Meyer’s functional analyses in the architecture. Possibly in consultation with the architect, Peterhans consistently chose perspectives that would illustrate Meyer’s claims for this socio-pedagogical building, and, in particular, raise awareness within the observer of the close relationship between architecture and nature. Peterhans presented the “school in the woods,” as Meyer liked to call the school, as an oasis of relaxation for the union members, set among pine trees, a place where students could focus solely on their education, and occasionally relax in the outdoor swimming pool. In Peterhans’ photographs, the school spreads out like a “learning factory,” with its seven building groups under flat roofs and three chimneys at the entrance aligned with the sloping terrain. It evinces no great ambitions to attract attention; rather, its aim is to serve those that spend time within its walls. His compositions emphasize the immediate connection between the interior and the exterior spaces, whose boundaries, owing to the extensive glass facades, seem to dissolve, with bright sunlight streaming through the interior spaces, creating a dramatic play of light and shadow where the dissolution of the complex’s architectonic barriers into nature plays a central role. In a photograph of the glazed corridor connecting the various educational and residential complexes, with its yellow bricks, chunky red-painted timbered ceiling, and windows extending from floor to ceiling, the focus is on the entire length of the corridor, due to the photographer’s placement next to a glass door between foyer and corridor. Discernible in the distance—typical of Peterhans’ architectural photography, which used human figures to create a sense of scale and function—a man enjoys the view of nature from the corridor. The dimensions and function of the corridor, extending past the entrances to the boarders’ rooms, and along the enclosed green area towards the seminar rooms and gymnasium, become immediately apparent: a place for casual meeting and conversation. Another photograph shows the end of the corridor in front of the gymnasium entrance and staircase leading to the classrooms. The space is filled with young swim-suited men washing their feet in the basin provided for this purpose. It is likely they have come from the sports ground or the open-air swimming pool nearby and are washing their feet before continuing on to their rooms. Another, taken from the end of the glazed corridor, looks upwards towards the color-coded boarders’ residences with their large glass doors. The factors important to Meyer during the planning of the school—nature and architecture in harmony, interaction between the students, recreation and education in one location—were brought together in a combination serving to articulate both modernist Bauhaus design principles and the precepts of the life reform movement of the Weimar Republic.

As noted previously, Walter Peterhans’ photographs do more than merely document the school. His images illustrate both the architect’s intentions for the building—the arrangement of the various building groups and their meaningful connections with one another—and the planning process itself, the environmental studies conducted by Bauhaus students to identify the needs of the residents and analyze the characteristics of the building site. One might surmise this approach was not the photographer’s idea alone, but was developed in concert with Meyer. In any case, it marks a clear turning point in the presentation of Bauhaus architecture, contrasting sharply with the heroic representations of the Bauhaus building under Gropius, taken from oblique angles by Lucia Moholy. Peterhans’ photographs, on the other hand, focus on the realization of the functional diagrams in the architecture. In so doing, the photographer manages both to close the distance between the observer and the Meyer-Wittwer building and the Bauhaus interior so that the viewer feels as if they are sitting in the reading room or entering the students’ boarding room, and also convey the overall concept of the building groups and their relationships to one another by means of a purposefully deployed range. In the process, Peterhans developed a photographic style mirroring the stripped-down functionalist aesthetic of the Bauhaus, using light, shadow, perspective, and scale to give tangible shape to both the qualities of the architecture and the aspirations of the architects’.