The Dessau Competition
Contrary to what one might have anticipated,the Dessau competition did not choose a site for the new museum near the present school,but instead envisioned a downtown location for it in a park-like setting. This was an open,international competition, and the organizers were not disappointed with the interest it gen-erated. What was surprising, was that the topfour premiated entries were all from abroad,with the two first place winners from Barcelona and New York. Not surprisingly, with the excep-tion of the one first place winner from the U.S.,all of the others were variations on easily recognizable themes out of the Bauhaus annals.
Since the Bauhaus was not only about architec-ture, but also art, one might understand the jury’s indecision in picking two contrasting choices for the top award. Their architectural expression rep-resented both disciplines—one having very func-tional, straightforward lines, the other more whimsical in the manner of an organic biological creation.
Jurying a competition with this challenging subject matter could hardly have been easy. The expert, jury was made up of:
? Barbara Holzer (Zürich / Berlin)
? Jürgen Mayer. (Berlin)
? Regine Leibinger (Berlin)
? Wolfgang Lorch (Darmstadt)
? Ralf Niebergall (Magdeburg)
? Matthias Vollmer (German Ministry of Building
& Construction)
? Guido Hager (Zürich)
After two stages, the jury finally reached the con-clusion that two first places should be awarded:
? Gonzalez Hinz Zabala with Roser Vives de Delás (Barcelona)
? Young & Ayata with Misako Murata (New York)
Third Place
? Berrel Berrel Kr?utler AG with ASP (Zürich)
Fourth Place
? Ja Architecture Studio, (Toronto)
Honorable Mentions
? Raummanufaktur (Edin Saronjic, Alexander Scholtysek),
(Darmstadt, Germany)
? Nussmüller Architekten ZT with Robert Kutscha (Graz, Austria)
? Steiner, Wei?enberger Architekten with Jens Henningsen (Berlin)
One might anticipate that the Bauhaus-like design by the Gonzalez Hinz Zabala team would be the final choice of the client for realization, if for no other reason than budget. Still, the Young & Ayata entry did raise the question as to whether archi-tects such as Frank Gehry do owe something to the Bauhaus—if for no other reason than in the theoretical evolution of the pro-fession to where we are today. Here, the jury evidently wanted to indicate that they were not focusing solely on derivative solutions harking back to Mies or Gropius, but were casting a wider net.