The other Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus story continues to fascinate 60 years after the school's dissolution. The Bauhaus started as a state school in Weimar but after a 1924 local election win for the conservative right wing it was given notice. Gropius unsuccessfully fought for a private Bauhaus school to remain in Weimar but he did at least manage to retain sole rights to the name Bauhaus and all design work carried out in the workshops. The pure uncompromising Bauhaus spirit, with its emphasis on art and design moved on to its Gropius-designed Dessau school.

Back in Weimar the government of Thuringia invited Otto Bartning, a Berlin-based architect friend of Gropius, to become director of a replacement school, the Bauhochschule (Building High School), in the van de Velde building in Weimar. This was to be an institution steering a middle course between the old academic teaching methods and those of the Bauhaus. This is what is meant by 'The Other Bauhaus', the title of an exhibition at the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum in Berlin until 23 February.

The ideals of this other Bauhaus were not so far removed from those of Gropius; both were trying to integrate craft and design. Bartning had been an early reformer of art and design education after the First World War along with other artists and architects including Gropius. He influenced Gropius' 1919 Bauhaus manifesto and his ideas for the other Bauhaus in 1926 were developments on the same theme. Students were quickly introduced and took part in real projects and marketed their designs. In 1927 the weaving department produced material for the German Pavilion at the Milan Fair, designed by Otto Bartning's architecture office. The workshops for joinery, metalwork, painting, weaving, pottery, book-binding and stage design all revolved around the building department under the architect Ernst Neufert, Gropius' former office manager. Students with building craft or technical school finals were given four semesters (two years) training which qualified them as architects. Alongside theoretical studies they worked in an aktiven Bauatelier, what would nowadays be called a project office, run on commercial lines and completing real buildings. The workshops were contracted to provide all the internal fittings for these projects as well as designing their own ceramic, metal, wood and fabric products which were publicised and distributed after 1928 by a specially set up company.

Bartning emphasised the relevance of an integrated architectural education to improving quality standards, necessary in economic competition between nations during the depression between the two world wars - and now. Similarly his writings in the magazine Die Volkswohnungen (People's Housing) are set among a mish-mash of back to nature articles and suggestions for land reform and a craft-based self-sufficient Germany and are open to interpretation seen from our knowledge of what was to follow.

The ambiguities of both the modernism of the Bauhaus and the more pragmatic craft-based other Bauhaus are the stuff of twentieth-century history, ideas flexible for both liberation and authoritarian politics. Even Bartning's attempt to steer a rational middle way failed under the ever narrowing political climate. In 1930, shortly after a National Socialist and conservative government coalition won power in Thuringia, Bartning resigned. Of the 14 professors and teachers at the other Bauhaus many continued their careers in Germany during the war, for example Neufert worked under Speer and went on to enjoy international success after the war. Bartning retreated into church architecture between 1933 and 1948, was later awarded honorary doctorates, including RIBA honorary membership, and held important posts as architect and advisor.