Importing Bauhaus, an exhibition supported by the New York Community Trust, features the work of German-born photographers Mark Römisch and Stefan Radtke, who investigate Bauhaus-inspired architecture in New England. Their images explore the transatlantic journey of Bauhaus design, celebrating form and function while also highlighting cultural migration and artistic legacy.

Römisch’s new publication on the same themes will also be available for preorder during the exhibit at www.bauhausnewengland.com.

His project Bauhaus New England – Portraits of an Architectural Legacy explores how modernist residential architecture, shaped by the Bauhaus aesthetic, quietly lives and breathes within the New England landscape. This long-term photography project began with a fascination: How did a radical German design movement take root in the wooded hills, rocky coastlines, and quiet neighborhoods of the American Northeast?

As a photographer, Römisch is drawn to places where form and emotions intersect—where design doesn’t just serve a purpose but also tells a story. His work seeks to reveal the poetry in how these homes inhabit their environment: the way a flat roof echoes the horizon or how a wall of glass opens a room to the rhythm of the trees beyond it. The images are meant to be portraits—not only of buildings, but of the enduring relationship between architecture and the land it occupies.

Many of the photographed homes are privately owned, rarely seen by the public, and designed by architects deeply influenced by Bauhaus principles—most notably Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, who brought the school’s vision to America after fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, thereby helping to lay the foundation for what we now know as mid-century modernism.

Bauhaus New England is Mark’s tribute to that vision. More than a style, Bauhaus was a philosophy of simplicity, utility, and harmony with nature. The images invite viewers into a conversation between architecture and landscape by rediscovering these lesser-known hidden homes and translating their quiet presence into visual form. This conversation continues to shape the spaces we live in today.

Mark received a 2025 Grant for Creative Individuals from the Mass Cultural Council for his work.

Stefan Radtke seeks to reveal in his work the shared DNA between Bauhaus and Brutalist commercial and civic architecture in the American Northeast, where both movements found fertile ground for evolution and experimentation. While seemingly disparate at first glance – Bauhaus with its emphasis on lightness and transparency, Brutalism with its bold concrete masses – both movements share fundamental principles: adherence to strict geometric shapes, truth to materials, rejection of ornament, emphasis on technology, and the celebration of function as form.

His ongoing series focuses on how the Bauhaus philosophies shaped American civic and commercial spaces between the 1930s and 1970s. Radtke is particularly drawn to how Bauhaus’s industrial aesthetics and social ideals gradually transformed into Brutalism’s raw concrete poetry. The series explores how the Bauhaus ethos, which sought to bridge the gap between art, craft, and technology, found its most powerful and unadorned expression in the civic architecture of this era.

Date and Time: Exhibition: May 18 – July 20, 2025; Opening Reception: Sunday, May 18, 1 to 3 PM

Location: ArtsWestchester, 31 Mamaroneck Ave, White Plains, NY

More Information: https://artswestchester.org/programs/gallery/importing-bauhaus/