About the Gropius Bau

Located in the middle of Berlin, the Gropius Bau strives to be an open, vital place of exchange for a wide variety of people. A place where encounters and engagement with art and each other is possible. A place for play and participation, where not just the visual, but all the senses are equally important – feeling, hearing, tasting and touching.

Here, the pressing issues of our time are artistically and speculatively presented and debated from different perspectives. Contemporary and modern art exhibitions are an integral part of the programme, as are performative and interdisciplinary formats. Artists are at the centre of everything we do: an expanded Artist-in-Residence programme invites artists to make work in several studios on the second floor of the Gropius Bau and to actively shape the exhibition house from the inside.

For the programme of the Gropius Bau, the history and location of the building and its senstive restoration form a central starting point for critical reflection. Designed by architects Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden as a Museum and School of Decorative Arts, the building opened to the public in 1881. In its dual function as an educational institution and museum, it housed classrooms and studios as well as collections of European crafts and an art library. The centrepiece of the exhibition hall was and remains the atrium, which, slightly lowered, extends outward in all four cardinal directions.

During the Second World War the building was badly damaged during air raids on Berlin. The roof and collection holdings in the basement were reduced to ashes; the northern facade and upper floors were almost completely destroyed. The ruins were left to decay until the 1960s, when the planned demolition was averted by the great nephew of its creator, architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. In 1966, the building was granted protected status under the name Martin-Gropius-Bau, before reconstruction work began in 1978 under architects Winnetou Kampmann and Ute Weström. The aim was to preserve the historical substance and traces of history as well as meet the demands of a modern exhibition venue. At the Gropius Bau today reconstructed mosaics, reliefs and majolica can be found alongside intentionally exposed gaps that attest to the building’s destruction. For the reopening the entrance had to be relocated to the south side given the building’s then proximity to the Berlin Wall; today’s main entrance on Niederkirchnerstraße was not reopened until 1999.