Metro News Melbourne - Newspaper Online - Victoria au newspaper south eastern Bayside Melbourne

You could be forgiven for mistaking the house in the accompanying photograph as just another Sorrento weekender, or for that matter a holiday house anywhere along our coastal strips.

However, its location is culturally and geographically far removed from the sand and surf scene of Victorian coastal towns. This is the original Bauhaus prototype Haus Am Horn built in Weimar, Germany, not long after the end of the First World War.

Weimar is renowned for its historical links to classical music and literature: Bach, Liszt, Goethe and Schiller were some of the names who found inspiration, solace and patrons in this refined city.

In 1923 when this house was built, flat roofs would have been anathema, and an unwelcome intrusion into Weimar’s ordered gentile neighbourhoods of the influential and the well- to-do.

Weimar’s conservative burghers didn’t take kindly to the radical avant-garde architects who abandoned time- honoured Germanic building traditions, such as high pitched gabled roofs and exposed decorative beams, in favour of utilitarian understatement and restraint.

After a few years of experimenting with these new concepts, the Bauhaus architectural and design group ruffled enough feathers that the school was surreptitiously run out of town for it’s subversive “Bolshevik sympathies”, and experimental work.

Flat roof houses devoid of any external ornamentation or elaboration was an unfamiliar concept too extreme to fathom in the 1920s, but 80 years later in present day Australia, variations of this building style dominate countless housing subdivisions throughout the land.

Architects and homeowners have been enthusiastic devotees of this original concept and have adapted to contemporary lifestyles.

Its influence has been particularly pervasive and acutely felt in coastal towns and new sea side subdivisions, where variations and bastardisations of this building style have been very much flavour of the month for several years now.

Torquay comes to mind as a town which has seen an avalanche of new buildings that borrow heavily from the Bauhaus school, some would unflatteringly describe these reproductions as uninspiring rip-offs .

Traditional Victorian holiday spots along the Bellarine and Mornington Peninsulas have felt the brunt of this new wave of flat roofed homes.

I’d wager that there are scores of long- term residents of these sea side towns who would secretly like to see the back of these builders of Neo Bauhaus Boxes, just as the residents of Weimar did in the 1920s.

By Fabrizio Marsani Fmarsani@yahoo.com.au