A Radical Functionalist

Lois Parkinson Zamora explores “Architect Hannes Meyer and Radical Modernism” by Georg Leidenberger.

By Lois Parkinson ZamoraNovember 19, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Biography & Autobiography

SIX YEARS AGO, in this publication, Georg Leidenberger, professor of urban history at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM Iztapalapa) in Mexico City, reflected on the 100th anniversary of the German school of architecture, art, and design known as the Bauhaus. At the time, I was reminded (and newly surprised) of the brevity of its existence. Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus functioned as a social and political movement as well as a school for future architects and designers. It was closed in 1933—not by the Nazis but because of them—a decision of the school’s faculty. Despite the Bauhaus having operated for only 14 years, its centenary was being celebrated worldwide 86 years after it had ceased to exist. Leidenberger wrote that it still represents for Germans and Germany one of their major contributions to modern world culture.

Leidenberger’s recent biography Architect Hannes Meyer and Radical Modernism (2023) approaches the question of this contribution through the life of the least known of the school’s three directors, the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954). Meyer began teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927, charged with creating a division for the study of architecture (up to this point, the school had taught only design). In 1928, he became the school’s director, appointed to the role by his predecessor, Walter Gropius, and was replaced two years later by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Meyer’s importance has been overshadowed by the achievements of Gropius and Mies, two of the most influential architects of the 20th century, but he deserves to be seen as an integral part of a distinguished trio: together they embody the different conceptions of the Bauhaus’s purposes and practice.

Meyer did not design or build nearly as prolifically as Gropius and Mies, but he was the architect, in many respects, of the Bauhaus’s legacy. In his short tenure as director, he shifted the focus of the curriculum away from workshops in skills like furniture-making and metalwork, and toward courses dealing with the social aims and effects of architecture and urban design—what Leidenberger calls Meyer’s “radical functionalism.” The relationship between ideology, urban planning, and building was central to his pedagogy at the Bauhaus, as it was throughout his career.

We see it in his first project, a housing cooperative for workers in the Swiss co-op housing community of Freidorf, near Basel. Started in 1919 and completed in 1921, the complex comprised housing for 600 residents in blocks of two-story apartments grouped around a common hall that included a school, gym, and market. Meyer conceived of exterior and interior spaces as shaping residents’ habits, relationships, and shared values: urban planning and architectural design understood as instruments of social progress. This communal complex, radical at the time, is still in use more than 100 years later and continues to operate as a cooperative.

Beyond the Freidorf complex, Meyer’s architectural legacy rests on a pair of designs for buildings that were never made and one that was. With his partner, Hans Wittwer, he submitted designs to competitions for commissions in the mid-1920s—one for a school in Basel, the other the headquarters of the League of Nations in Geneva. Neither was selected, but it was likely on the strength of these designs that Meyer came to Gropius’s attention as he looked for a successor, and they remain fundamental documents in the history of the Bauhaus.

Meyer’s most important design, the ADGB Trade Union School in the Berlin suburb of Bernau, inaugurated in 1930, marked his first building since the Freidorf project. Prior to its completion, as Leidenberger notes, “Meyer had spent almost a decade doing pretty much everything but actually building: putting together exhibits, publishing, drafting audacious but finally utopian building projects, teaching and administrating.” Finally, in Bernau, he was again able to materialize his ideas about how architectural spaces could form (and reform) collective mentalities. Whether it succeeded in shaping residents’ attitudes is questionable; its success as a building is not. The school became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

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The name “Bauhaus” joins the German words for “building” and “house,” inverting the order of the word for “construction”: “Hausbau.” Already an established architect when he was asked to direct the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar in 1919, Gropius changed the name of the school and set about revolutionizing the ways in which arts and crafts were taught. He and the newly appointed faculty in Weimar took the exigencies of daily life in post–World War I Germany as opportunities. Their fundamental aesthetic principles were that beauty should not be ornamental; the useful is integral to the beautiful; the fine arts and the applied arts are of a piece; the industrial should be artistic, and vice versa; and, at Meyer’s insistence, art should be affordable and available to mass markets.

The emphasis on arts and crafts, even when adapted to industrial techniques, has echoes of 19th-century German Romanticism, when the expressive forms of das Volk came to be seen as pathways toward an authentic national identity. How appealing such echoes must have seemed in the wreckage of World War I and, indeed, through World War II, as those echoes took on sinister tones.

While populist intentions and the aim of streamlining design according to functionalist principles had been fundamental to the Bauhaus from the beginning, it took Meyer to codify these into a full-blown social ideology. He believed in the transformative power of all things designed, built, and used, and he insisted on egalitarian access to those things. He pushed the functionalist ethos—usually summed up in Louis Sullivan’s phrase from three decades earlier, form follows function—a step further: not only did function determine form, but collective needs must dictate the construction of buildings, the planning of urban spaces, and the design of household objects.

Following the closure of the Bauhaus, both Gropius and Mies would make their way to the United States. The former taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the latter at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, both accepting many prestigious private commissions. These two German American architects died the same year, 1969, Gropius aged 86 and Mies 83. Their work is often considered of a piece with that of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. How different the path of Hannes Meyer.

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Meyer was removed from the directorship of the Bauhaus in 1930 by the mayor of Dessau because of his leftist leanings. He took off for the Soviet Union, accompanied by like-minded colleagues and students—the so-called “Red Bauhaus Brigade”—and he would remain there for the next six years because it became impossible to work in Germany as a “socialist planner,” as Meyer described himself.

In 1933, Meyer was hired by the Soviet government to oversee the sector of East Siberia and the Far East for the National Institute of Urban Planning. In this role, he drafted a regional plan for the Jewish settlement of Birobidzhan in Siberia. Established in 1928 and declared a Jewish Autonomous Region (or Oblast) in 1934, Birobidzhan was part of a Soviet effort to populate and industrialize this desolate region near the Chinese border and Sea of Japan. The idea of a “Soviet Zion” attracted international support, and immigrants arrived from within the Soviet Union and beyond—Meyer reported people arriving from Korea, Manchuria, Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, and France—with Yiddish as the lingua franca.

Meyer’s social functionalism coincided “quite neatly with Soviet ideology,” as Leidenberger writes, except when settlers had ideas of their own (“excessive individualism,” as Meyer testily put it). Nonetheless, he and his colleagues laid out a new residential city on an elevated Siberian plateau. Leidenberger presents ample documentary evidence that Meyer “took particular pride in the very existence of a Jewish settlement in the Soviet Union when antisemitism was being institutionalized in Nazi Germany,” though Stalinism entailed its own version of antisemitism. Today, only around one percent of Birobidzhan’s population is Jewish.

Meyer returned to Switzerland in 1936, but, unable to work there as a known communist, he set his eyes on another destination he hoped would provide an agreeable ideological environment: Mexico. In 1938, he attended a conference on urban planning in Mexico City where he gave lectures on the Bauhaus and the Soviet Union and was offered the directorship of a new urban planning institute at the school of architecture in the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. Postrevolutionary Mexico had prominent socialist and communist exponents, including artists and architects Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Juan O’Gorman, Leopoldo Méndez, and José Luis Cuevas Pietrasanta. The leftist president Lázaro Cárdenas had recently nationalized Mexico’s oil resources, the country was working to create modern institutions, and Mexico City was growing at a stunning rate.

The muralist movement, led by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, dominated this period artistically, insisting on the political and persuasive role of art. Kilometers of walls were covered in painted scenes, often on public buildings, former convents, monasteries, and viceregal palaces from the 17th and 18th centuries. The function of the form was now to depict the collective gains of the revolution and provide a shared national and cultural narrative. This project of nation-formation called for schools, hospitals, housing, and urban planning, as well as state-orchestrated management of resources.

The new Instituto de Planificación y Urbanismo (Institute of Urban Planning, IPU) that Meyer oversaw began operations in January 1940, and he built on the educational ideas he had developed at the Bauhaus. The curriculum included theoretical seminars, workshops, and fieldwork in rural and urban communities. In an echo of his experiences at the Bauhaus, Meyer’s directorship here was brief: the IPU closed its doors in the summer of 1941, after only a year and a half.

Leidenberger proposes several reasons for this summary closure of the IPU, but surely Meyer’s ideological fervor, which included outspoken support of Stalin, had something to do with it. The architect Juan O’Gorman, a pioneer of functionalism and state-sponsored urban planning and construction in Mexico, should have been an ideal colleague and ally, but he was a Trotskyist. He was probably instrumental in closing the IPU and getting rid of that “Stalin man,” as he referred to Meyer. This ideological divide had considerable consequences not only for Meyer’s career but also for socialist ambitions in Mexico more broadly.

Nonetheless, Meyer stayed on in Mexico and continued to work for collective solutions to urgent social needs. He was hired to plan Mexico’s first integrated workers’ housing project and its first central hospital complex, but for political and financial reasons neither came to fruition. He also participated in the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), an alliance of artists who produced images for print media—flyers, posters, broadsides, magazines, book covers, movie posters. While the group, steeped in postrevolutionary socialist ideals, aimed to reach a wide audience using graphic media for political persuasion, their work was mostly occasional and ephemeral, produced on cheap paper for particular events and publications. Here, Meyer did find allies and friends, including Leopoldo Méndez, an extraordinary engraver whose prints of the Mexican Revolution and its disastrous human cost have recently been exhibited in the Museo de la Estampa (Print Museum) in Mexico City. Meyer’s work with the Taller, by contrast, has not been preserved.

Mexico might have been better served by Meyer’s talent and energy had he been able to negotiate the internecine ideological conflicts on the left—or moderate his own position. He did continue to work for the government until he returned to Switzerland in 1949, but all of his projects were shelved. He didn’t design a single building in Mexico because he refused to work for corporations or on projects he deemed capitalist. The great irony of Meyer’s career is that in this country ready to implement the kind of collectivist projects he had devoted his life to pursuing, he was unable to materialize his vision. As Leidenberger puts it rather wistfully, “Meyer’s elaborate and varied drafts remain an archival treasure only.” This treasure largely resides (again somewhat ironically) in the Bauhaus archives in Dessau.

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If we consider the Bauhaus trio spatially, we might say that Gropius and Mies were architects of the vertical, whereas Meyer was an architect of the horizontal. The beautiful towers in Chicago and New York contrast dramatically with a community on a Siberian plateau or workers’ housing in Mexico. With hindsight, it’s easy enough to see the rising tides of capitalism—as it is to see that Meyer was swimming against the current.