Hannes Meyer

Hans Emil "Hannes" Meyer (November 18, 1889 – July 19, 1954) was a Swiss architect and second director of the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930.

Meyer was born in Basel, Switzerland, trained as a mason, and practiced as an architect in Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany, briefly serving as a department head at the Krupp Works in Essen from 1916 to 1918. In Zurich in 1923 he co-founded the architectural magazine 'ABC Beiträge zum Bauen' (Contributions on Building) with Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, and the Supremist/Russian cultural ambassador, El Lissitzky.

Meyer's design philosophy is reflected in the following quote:

"1. sex life, 2. sleeping habits, 3. pets, 4. gardening, 5. personal hygiene, 6. weather protection, 7. hygiene in the home, 8. car maintenance, 9. cooking, 10. heating, 11. exposure to the sun, 12. services - these are the only motives when building a house. We examine the daily routine of everyone who lives in the house and this gives us the functional diagram - the functional diagram and the economic programme are the determining principles of the building project."(Meyer, 1928)

In 1926 Meyer established a firm with Hans Wittwer and produced his two most famous projects, for the Basel Petersschule (1926) and for the Geneva League of Nations Building (1926/1927). Both projects are strict, inventive, and rely on the new possibilities of structural steel. Neither was built. The Petersschule was designed to be a new primary school for girls, where the school itself would be raised as high above the ground as possible to allow for sunlight and fresh air.

Walter Gropius appointed Meyer head of the Bauhaus architecture department when it was finally established in April 1927, though Mart Stam had been Gropius's first choice. Meyer brought his radical functionalist viewpoint he named, in 1929, Die neue Baulehre (the new way to build), that architecture was an organizational task with no relationship to aesthetics, that buildings should be low cost and designed to fulfill social needs. Although he was fired for allegedly politicizing the school, scholars have shown that to be incorrect.

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