Google's Bauhaus Everywhere is a digital cornucopia with AR buildings, online exhibits and more

Arts & Culture is Google's project aimed to make culture more accessible to anyone, anywhere, on smartphones, laptops and tablets. In the past, it has offered digital access to such different topics as Van Gogh's bedroom paintings, Dinosaurs and Food in Japan. Now, to celebrate the end of the Bauhaus centenary, it Google Arts and Culture launches Bauhaus Everywhere, an online collection of many useful and even rare resources about the school founded back in 1919, with three immersive augmented reality models of three buildings “dreamed up“, as Google says, but never constructed. Each model was created by Google Arts & Culture engineers in collaboration with experts of Bauhaus Dessau who chose sketches and descriptions of visionary structures from the archives. The BAMBOS house was a metal structure supposed to be built in front of the Bauhaus building, which comes from a series of residential and studio buildings imagined by Marcel Breuer for his colleagues and himself; the small Rundhaus could be assembled with just 16 self-supporting lightweight panels and its standardised components attracted a lot of attention among experts one century ago, while the Court House by Eduard Ludwig is an example of lined up houses, a typical task for the teaching of Mies van der Rohe.

For this project, Google partnered with Berlin Dessau, UNESCO World Heritage Site FAGUS Factory, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, IIT Institute of Design, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2 exhibitions), Getty Research Institute (1 exhibition), Museum of Design Excellence (India). Besides the AR models, Bauhaus Everywhere contents include a Google Earth tour with 10 highlights from Tel-Aviv to the USA, a street view coverage of the grounds of Bauhaus Dessau in Germany, a high-res focus on Wassily Kandinsky's "Yellow. Red. Blue" and the particular condition that made him hear colours and more. Among the online exhibitions, there's one that reconstructs the life as a student at the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius as a principal, while current director Claudia Perren explains Mies van der Rohe Glass highrise, Brauer's famous picture with students and more icons of the school. There are also 5 animated videos which demystify key aspects of Bauhaus and get insights into how its influence is still seen today.