>sotsgorod/ bauhaus brigade

Because of Communist sympathies and a relationship with one of his female students, Hannes Meyer, the Swiss director of the famous modernist art school Bauhaus in Dessau, was dismissed. With his secretary (yet another lover of Meyer) and seven loyal students, among whom Philipp Tolziner, he was invited in 1930 to work in the Soviet Union.

They wanted to stay together as a group, calling themselves 'Left Column'. They requested to live like Russians in a communal house in Moscow. They were paid as Russians and worked with Russians in Giprovtuz, where they designed schools for future Soviet engineers. After 1934 three of them worked for Gorstroy Project, together with the remaining specialists of the Brigade May.

Hannes Meyer in a lecture for Soviet officials (comparing the Bauhaus brigade to the group around Ernst May): "If May's architecture is the cake, then we want to work on the daily bread of proletarian culture. So don¹t think tovarishchi, that we are cold specialists. See us as comrades prepared to dedicate their energy and experience to socialism and the revolution."
hannes meyer 1931
bauhaus brigade 1931

Hannes Meyer
Philip Tolziner

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