Burg Giebichenstein - University of Art and Design Halle

In 1930, a Berliner newspaper reported: “Never has a castle been more sensibly elevated to usefulness!” In 1918 the City of Halle bought the lower fortress nd reconstructed it for three million marks. In 1922 the “Workshops of the city of Halle, Burg Giebichenstein, the State and Municipal School of the Applied Arts” moved into the lower fortress.

After the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, many Bauhaus artists moved to Halle. First to arrive was the sculptor Gerhard Marcks, who was director here from 1928 to 1933. Many followed, such as the ceramic artist Marguerite Friedlaender. Unlike at Bauhaus, women were employed at the BURG as teachers as early as the 1920s. The National Socialists closed all of the free classes and fired many teachers. The school was then “brought into line” by the Nazis as the “Meisterschule des Deutschen Handwerks” (School of German Craftsmanship). After the war, the BURG once again served as a university for industrial design, harkening back to its pre-1933 history in order to pick up where it left off.

Today at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, men and women are equally represented in professor positions.