Hannes Meyer

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Hannes Meyer

H. Meyer: Freidorf Dwelling Estate in Muttenz, Switzerland

Hannes Meyer (November 18, 1889–July 19, 1954) was a Swiss architect and second director of the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930.

The Bauhaus had been founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius. Gropius appointed Meyer head of the Bauhaus architecture department when it was finally established in October 1926. Meyer brought his radical functionalist viewpoint that architecture was more craft than fine art, that buildings should be low cost and designed to fulfill social needs. He was also an ardent Marxist.

Meyer brought the two most significant important building commissions for the school, both of which still stand: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau, and the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.

But he also brought political dissension, both within the Bauhaus and outside. Inside the school, particularly after he became director on Gropius's resignation in February 1928, he tightened the Bauhaus program around architecture and industrial design, forcing the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and other figures. Outside, in the context of an increasingly dangerous Weimar political atmosphere, Meyer's vocal Communism and his encouragement of the Communist student organization in the Bauhaus became a threat to the very existence of the school. Gropius fired him in 1930.

Meyer responded by taking seven students and a secretary to Moscow, forming a group they called the "Left Column". This was a parallel effort to Ernst May's "May brigade". Both groups worked on architectural and urban planning projects guided by socialist-utopian ideals. The Soviet Union dismissed all such foreigners in 1936.

Meyer returned to Geneva for three years, then emigrated to Mexico City to work for the Mexican government as the director of the Instituto del Urbanismo y Planification from 1942 through 1949. In 1942 he was with his friend the Italian photographer Tina Modotti the night she died. He himself died in Switzerland in 1954.