Funcionalism, scenography, photomontage Haus Nolden 1928

Abstract

Absatract

In April 1928 Hannes Meyer substituted Walter Gropius as the Director of the Bauhaus in Dessau and founded the architecture workshop where the project for a single-family house, Haus Nolden, was developed by Meyer collaborating with Hans Wittwer and Hans Volger. Although in Haus Nolden we find the language of modern architecture, simple volumes, flat roof, flat surfaces and horizontal windows, this language is not used here, as in Gropius´s houses at Dessau, as an exhibition of the possibilities of cubic architecture in a house of certain size. It only intends to be a direct response to the functional duplicity involved in the job, to make a public activity, Dr. Nolden´s office, coexist within a domestic building. A direct response to that particular program seems to be responsible for the final form of the building, characterized by the particular way in which both functions are articulated.
Along with the utilitarian and material theories which marginalize the decorative and aesthetic function of architecture, pure functionality could enter the Bauhaus as the main criteria for the construction of form, although Haus Nolden were an isolated experiment without any continuity even within the School, as Mies van der Rohe would be appointed Director of the Bauhaus two years later, in 1930. But, although for a brief period of time, Hannes Meyer promoted in the architecture workshop of the School the montage procedures as a way to agglutinate the different building components, putting aside other criteria based on composition, proportions or even perspective.