IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A

Abstract

The Bauhaus—the twentieth century’s famous art, design, and architecture school—became UNESCO World Heritage in 1996. It built a school for the General German Trade Union (ADGB-School) in Bernau between 1928 and 1930, which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2017, being recognized as an important contribution “to the Bauhaus ideas of austere design, functionalism and social reform.” [https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/729/] The proposed paper intends to embed the ADGB-School and its design process into the discourse of architectural lighting. Daylighting became an important topic at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, relating a multitude of scientific and artistic fields, such as hygiene and medicine, engineering and lighting science, factory management (increased worker efficiency), school design, urban planning (right-to-light legislation), among others. The ADGB-School served the Bauhaus as a study and experimentation field for best solar orientation and the development of building elements for improved daylighting. Throughout the design and completion process, scientific advancements for light metrics, calculations, or solar representations were adopted. Technical details for glass facades, glass roofs, butterfly ceilings, or light-reflecting materials were studied, implemented, and justified as creating the highest possible impact on workers living in overcrowded, poorly lit and ventilated tenement buildings. Questioning the dominating techno-social interpretation of functionalism, the paper intends to reveal the project’s daylighting strategies’ impactful aesthetic qualities, producing contemplative atmospheres through directed and diffused light, light-shadow contrasts, and considerate inside-outside relationships.