Bauhaus in BaVARIA

The “Bauhaus in Bavaria” VR Experience is a personal journey through time to the last buildings of Bauhaus icon Walter Gropius: the Rosenthal factory am Rothbühl in Selb and the Glass Cathedral in Amberg, Bavaria.

The VR documentary is also a story of spiritual kinship between Gropius and the porcelain manufacturer Philip Rosenthal. Together, they wanted to build new factories that put people first, not design.

Gropius designed the Rosenthal am Rothbühl porcelain factory in 1965. He sketched a single-storey structure, a reinforced concrete skeleton structure with prefabricated components and a portal with a free-floating concrete slab – the imposing “butterfly roof”.

Gropius worked on the design like a madman. He said : “Only perfect harmony in the technical function and in the proportions of forms can produce beauty. That’s what makes our job so varied and so complicated.”

During his time in Amberg and Selb, Gropius designed the TAC porcelain service, named after his Boston architectural studio. The VR Experience gives viewers a sense of the design’s development.

The story is told as an essay based on the memories of Gropius’ contemporary and collaborator, Alex Cvijanovic, who conveys the mood of the time, explains why Gropius and Rosenthal brought flamingos to Selb and why a lost bet is to blame for Gropius having to design a Bauhaus-style pigsty.

The VR Experience presents previously unpublished photos and sketches from the archives of Harvard and Rosenthal, as well as from private collections. It was shot in Selb, Amberg and Boston with the use of drones, cable cam and elaborate animations of the original sketches of Walter Gropius and Alex Cvijanovic.

YEAR: 2019 /
CLIENT:
TAGS: New Media VR

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