Heike Hanada designs minimalist cultural monument for Weimar

The Bauhaus Museum in Weimar has opened with a weekend of festivities on 6 and 7 April 2019. Designed by Heike Hanada, the new museum was planned by Klassik Stiftung Weimar, one of Germany’s largest cultural institutions and the owner of a unique ensemble of cultural monuments. In 2011, Klassik Stiftung Weimar teamed up with the City of Weimar to hold a worldwide open architecture competition to find a design for the museum. A total of 536 firms submitted their contributions, with Heike Hanada selected following a bidding procedure which took place among the winning teams.

The minimalistic, cube-shaped building presents the collection and its relevance to contemporary society on five levels across 2,000 sq m of exhibition space. The monolithic façade of the building is divided by 24 horizontal lines of LED lights, adding illumination at night and giving the building a distinctive appearance. Visitors enter the museum via the spacious foyer or via a terrace from the adjacent park, encouraging links between the new structure and the surrounding area. Heike Hanada stated: “After many years of planning and building, the moment has finally arrived: the completion of a building with a striking urbanistic presence. The connection between the city and the park was very important to me, for the museum is defined by its function in the public sphere. This is mirrored by the design concept which features two-story open spaces and cascading stairs which invite one to stroll and linger.”

With exhibitions based on Walter Gropius’s question: “How do we want to live together?”, the museum curators seek to highlight the history of Bauhaus in order to explore pressing issues related to the design of our living environment. Before the opening, Hellmut Seemann, president of Klassik Stiftung Weimar, said: “At the centre of our concept is the aim to present modernism as a battle of competing ideas, exemplified by the displayed objects. The emergence of the Bauhaus 100 years ago reminds us that we, too, are the designers of our world and must remain so.” 

Lucy Nordberg
TenderStream Head of Research

This competition was first published by TenderStream on 19.07.2011 here

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