Sculpture 

This is the only stone sculpture that has survived from the sculpture workshop. Otto Werner’s work has the programmatic title Construction Sculpture: its blocky structure with a complex spatial layering of individual cubic shapes is borrowed from the New Architecture advocated by the Bauhaus and others. At the same time, Werner’s abstract sculpture also suggests associations with a human figure. The models for it were sculptures and reliefs by Oskar Schlemmer that work with overlays of architectural and figurative elements.

Schlemmer succeeded Johannes Itten as Form Master in the sculpture workshops for wood and stone in 1922. In the following period, the two workshops departed from their programmatic focus on architecture. Due to a lack of actual commissions from the field of architectural sculpture, free sculptural works were increasingly produced. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a reorientation took place; in the ‘Sculpture Workshop’ established in 1925 under Joost Schmidt, elementary training in sculpture was given that had parallels in the teaching work of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. The aim was to ‘arouse, develop and intensify the spatial imagination, conscious experience of spatial sense perceptions and implementation of spatial ideas’, as one of the students, Heinz Loew, described it. Practical applications were available in the areas of stage design, model-making and exhibition architecture.