Spatial Stage Meyer-Grohbruegge

// Exhibition Architecture
from February 2024
Bauhaus Museum Dessau,
ground floor

In April 2022, the Berlin architectural firm Meyer-Grohbruegge won the architecture competition to redesign the entrance hall of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. The design addresses the stage-like character of the large semi-public interior space on the ground floor.

Two large walls that turn very slowly on their own axes and one circular, stage-like disc, likewise mobile, enable the spatial zones to be connected and separated. The walls can also be temporarily fixed in place, enabling simultaneous applications or uses and diverse exhibition settings. But due to the movement of the elements, the space is perceived less as a conventional exhibition space than as a spatial performance generating a dynamic relationship between the spectator and the objects on view. The moving architectonic-sculptural elements open up shifting spatial perspectives, not only on exhibitions and events, but also on other visitors and their movement in the space, with the architecture as an active participant.

The architects of Meyer-Grohbruegge thus align themselves with certain spatial concepts of the Bauhaus. The historic Bauhaus stage was to be understood less as a conventional performance practice than as an experimental methodology. Many of the Bauhaus projects focused on an explorative development of movements of both material and physical nature, in conjunction with the production and experience of spatial effects. Costumed dance movement studies, light-play devices, and theatre architectures were invariably also “spatial devices”, with human beings participating in a mobile and communicative network of relationships.