What thoughts must have crossed the minds of Sauerbruch Hutton when they won the competition in 1998 to design a new headquarters from Germany's federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt/ UBA) - in Dessau? How much would the Bauhaus (a short walk away) and its history impinge on the minds of the designers? Matthias Sauerbruch addressed the issue in a 2002 lecture, 'Modernism without dogma'. He noted that whereas the Bauhaus had concerned itself, in broad terms, with the unification of art and technology, the UBA stands for the symbiosis of technology and nature. The Bauhaus discounted the relationship of buildings to nature, wilfully ignoring the effects of sun by providing a giant single-glazed window facade facing west not north:'The self-confident geometry of the building and its prismatic purity communicated ... unbroken dominance over nature (which, as we all know by now, has a purely rhetorical character, as the building is in a permanent state of decay.)' For Sauerbruch Hutton, the Bauhaus served as 'model and warning'. It celebrated an extraordinary combination of artistic impulse, desire to build, and a truly impressive attitude to production (the entire project was designed and built in 18 months). Yet the project was flawed by 'the contradiction between standardisation/mass production on the one hand, and artistically inspired craftsmanship on the other', which resulted in very limited use of standardised construction, and hardly any industrial prefabrication. It makes the construction programme look even more impressive.
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