Review: Bauhaus zwanzig––21; Bauhaus Twenty––21: An Ongoing Legacy; Bauhaus zwanzig––21: Fotografien von Gordon Watkinson

Bauhaus zwanzig––21 ; Deutsches Architektur-Museum, Frankfurt am Main; 7 March––26 April 2009 Bauhaus Twenty––21: An Ongoing Legacy ; International Cultural Centre, Krakow; 8 May––5 July 2009 Bauhaus zwanzig––21: Fotografien von Gordon Watkinson ; Haus der Gegenwart, Munich; 26 February––14 March 2010 The existence of myths depends on repetition: they have to be told again and again. And what better occasion to retell the myth of the Bauhaus as the essence of twentieth-century modern architecture than in 2009, the ninetieth anniversary of its founding. Myriad exhibitions and publications on the Bauhaus flourished——and the Deutsches Architektur-Museum in Frankfurt showed a very special one. Curated by New York photographer Gordon Watkinson in association with the Berlin-based Foto+Synthesis, advised by Bauhaus-Museum director Michael Siebenbrodt and architectural critic Falk Jaeger, it also provoked several of misunderstandings. First, it was not an exhibition about architecture as much as architectural photography. Large, beautiful, well composed, and carefully selected black-and-white photographs told something about the craft and aesthetics of architectural photography, but not about the buildings shown. Nearly all presented details in frontal view, quite often with a central viewpoint and symmetrically arranged. This resulted in wonderful images, but tended to reduce the buildings to two-dimensional graphics. Selected floor plans helped somewhat in our understanding of the buildings, but more often they distracted from the aesthetic qualities of the photographs and obscured the visual clarity of the exhibition. Second, this was not an exhibition on the Bauhaus itself, but on contemporary architecture, or more precisely on a specific strand of contemporary architecture that links back to the Bauhaus. We learned little about original concepts, intentions, and means of Bauhaus buildings, and nothing about their historic context, but we learned …