The joint first-place design by Gonzalez Hinz Zabala, Barcelona
Photo: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has announced the finalists of the design competition for a new Bauhaus Museum in the city of Dessau.

In an unexpected twist, the jury was unable to agree on a single winner, resulting in the creation of a ranking system instead. The foundation will now begin negotiations with the finalists to determine who will be awarded the contract to build the €25 million museum ($27.9 million).

The joint first-place design by Young & Ayata, New York
Photo: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

The first place was jointly awarded to architects Gonzalez Hinz Zabala, Barcelona, and Young & Ayata, New York. They are followed by Maurice Berrel, Zurich in third place and Nima Javidi, Toronto, in fourth.

“There will not be a mixture of the proposed designs,” Claudia Perren, Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation assured Art Magazin, adding that a final decision would be announced before the end of the year. “Then we will know definitively with whom we will build.”

The third placed design by Maurice Berrel, Zurich
Photo: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

“It is still possible, although we hope this scenario doesn’t happen, that the negotiations with the winning candidates end negatively, in which case we will negotiate with the third and fourth place candidates,” Perren said, adding that the jury may be consulted again.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has the second largest Bauhaus collection in the world, with the majority of the 40,000 piece collection hidden away in a warehouse.

The fourth place design by Nima Javidi, Toronto.
Photo: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

The foundation says that the new museum will allow them to display more of its treasures. The museum is scheduled to open in 2019, coinciding with the 100 year anniversary of Bauhaus.

Young & Ayata included a figure from Rineke Dijkstra’s work Ruth Drawing Picasso in their proposed design rendering.
Photo: Art Magazin

Meanwhile, eagle-eyed followers of the competition have noticed that Young & Ayata’s rendering includes a familiar figure. It has become common practice for architects to include large-scale sculptures by the likes of Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder or Louise Bourgeois in their renderings. But here, the New York architects used images of people from an artwork to demonstrate how visitors will interact with their design.

Yes, leaning against a display is Ruth, the schoolgirl from Rineke Dijkstra‘s video artwork Ruth Drawing Picasso (2009), which you can watch here.

The architects culled an image from the Dijkstra’s video art.
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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