Bauen nach dem Bauhaus

Abstract

Abstract Hermann Blomeier is one of around 80 graduates from the Bau- und Ausbauabteilung, a comparatively small group among the more than 1200 students at the Bauhaus who have only recently come under the spotlight of research. The biographies of several graduates are known, such as Franz Ehrlich, Erich Consemüller, Howard Dearstyne, Selman Selmanagić, Herbert Hirche or Arieh Sharon; many more are lost, however. Although the Bauhaus was not a ›school‹ in the sense of a unified design approach and a binding canon of forms, it is instructive on an individual level to study the work of Blomeier, one of the Bauhaus graduates and students of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who has so far received little attention. On the basis of three projects from the 1950s, the viability of the design approaches conveyed at the Bauhaus for the construction tasks of the post-war period are examined. First, the ferry ports connecting Konstanz and Meersburg will be considered as the first major project by Blomeier after the Second World War. The buildings for the Bodensee-Wasserversorgung – at times the largest construction site in West Germany of the 1950s – represent an outstanding example of industrial architecture and technical infrastructure in their fusion of art, technology and landscape. The smallest of the three projects, the building for the rowing club Neptun, located directly opposite the old town of Konstanz on the Seerhein, points with its innovative modular primary structure well beyond contemporary architecture and anticipates developments of the late 1960s, such as the Japanese Metabolists or the Plug-In-City of Archigram.