A journey through the work of Anni Albers - The Silver Fabric

Anni Albers was one of the most innovative and influential textile designer and graphic artist of the 20th century. She shared her life and artistic vision with her husband Josef Albers. Both were incredibly talented avant-garde artists and their practice was clearly ahead of their time.

Like many other people who are interested in art and architecture, I discovered Anni Albers’s work when I visited the Bauhaus building in Dessau where she was teaching in the textile design workshop of the school. Through the years, I began to learn a little more about her interests and research fields. Her deep knowledge of the materials and techniques of weaving, her geometric patterns and her sense of color are known by everyone, but what a surprise when I read for the first time that Anni Albers had studied the acoustic properties of fabrics ! In 1929, a young woman, in her thirties, explored the properties of sound absorption and reflection of light in textiles for her diploma project ! As an acoustician (and new beginner weaver), this resonated with me and created an almost “intimate” bond with an artist whom I already appreciated so much.

I had the chance to see some of these textiles samples in 2021 during the exhibition ??Anni et Josef Albers. L'art et la vie?? in the Modern Art Museum in Paris.

Very little literature exists on this work, but it is known that Anni Albers created these sound absorbing, hand-woven fabric using the looms of the Bauhaus school. These textiles were made up to cover the walls of the auditorium of the Bundesschule in Bernau, in Germany.

During a few days of vacation near Berlin with my family, I came across a small book by Lake Verea, an artistic duo who have carried out an intimate and remarkable work by photographing the objects belonging to the couple and preserved in the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation.

As I read in this book that “the auditorium has disappeared and his memory has faded”, I wanted to know a little more about the building.

So I decided to take a trip to Bernau in search of more information.

Once there, talking with the staff of the Welterbe Bauhaus in Bernau, I learned that the concrete shell of the auditorium of the Bundesschule, called the ??Aula??, still exists, but the appearance of the lecture room has completely changed. The wall coverings have been totally removed. I was able to see an original model of the auditorium as well as a reproduction of the fabric (by Jongeriuslab Design Studio) which shows its composition.

As it can be read on the Bauhaus Denkmal Bundesschule Bernau official website:

??When the skeleton of the building was in place and the foundation of the square-shaped lecture hall rising over the one-story main building was completed, Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer identified a fundamental problem with the space: there was a terrible echo (…). The poor acoustics were a consequence of the cubic shape of the lecture hall, whose sides were of equal length (just over fourteen meters). The resulting effect can be described as a game of acoustic ping-pong.

To counteract the undesirable echo effect and to evenly distribute light throughout the room, a material had to be found that could fulfill both requirements. But a material with these properties did not exist yet in 1929. So the Bauhaus quickly commissioned one of its best weavers to develop, as part of her thesis, the material needed for the Trade Union School lecture hall.??

To reduce the sound reflections, Anni Albers experimented a new kind of fabric : it was made of a cottony-soft chenille on one side, and on the other side, a layer of black cotton and transparent cellophane threads woved together, creating a wavy and ??porous?? structure. Because of its shiny appearance, the fabric was also known as ??Silver Fabric??.

Unfortunately no measurement or record exist, showing the improvement of the acoustic quality of the lecture room in Bernau with sound absorbing covering.

A similar experimental work was carried out by another outstanding Bauhaus textile designer, Gunta St?lzl, who developed an innovating waffle-structure fabric for the Kino Urban movie theater in Berlin, made of cellophane and cotton.

Anni Albers believed in the importance of making useful art. As she said :

The conscientious designer, does not himself design at all but rather give the object-to-be a chance to design itself. (Anni Albers, 1958)

?

To learn more about sound absorbing “Silver Fabric”:

https://www.bauhaus-denkmal-bernau.de/en/trade-union-school/inventory/300-meters-of-silver-fabric-for-the-lecture-hall-anni-alberss-bauhaus-diploma-thesis.html