built in 1924, the Landhaus Ilse, or Ilse country house, has been an incongruous presence on the edge of Burbach, a provincial town in wooded hills halfway between Frankfurt and Cologne. Not only does the yellow single-storey box, with its illuminated central shaft, stand in contrast to the region’s traditional timber-framed and slate-clad homes. The house itself seems paradoxical.
Three major exhibitions are being held in Germany to mark the centenary, one in each of the school’s successive home towns: Weimar, where it was established by Gropius; Dessau, which it moved to in 1925; and Berlin, where it was run by Mies van der Rohe in 1932-33 before closing under pressure from the Nazis. The last, put on by the Bauhaus Archive, a museum, will open in September, as will the one in Dessau . The Ilse house will feature prominently in Berlin.
Actually, the plan was for the white-cubed, flat-roofed Haus am Horn in Weimar—the Bauhaus’s earliest foray into architecture, which had been the main exhibit in the school’s first big show, in 1923. All the rooms in the Haus am Horn were—like those of the Ilse house—organised around a central, sky-lit family room. The layout was socially progressive and aesthetically controversial . The Haus am Horn was long thought to be unique.
“Part of the fascination about the Ilse house is that we don’t know everything,” says Christoph Ewers, the town’s mayor. What seems clear is that, in Burbach, the newfangled Haus am Horn was turned into what the mayor calls “a representative, traditional upper-middle-class house”. The town declared the building a landmark in 2001 and took it over in 2017 after Wirtz, the entrepreneur, died. Ms Jaeggi was the first bigwig from one of the latter-day Bauhaus institutions to pay a visit.