ABSTRACT
The Rabe house, inhabited by painted and constructed figures of the Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer, offers a glimpse into the affecting presence of architecture. Schlemmer's theatrical play within this house affected its inhabitants directly, casting them as both audience and actor. He transformed the spatial intersection originally designed by Rabe into a moment of theatrical ambiguity. Schlemmer's wall designs, which were inserted into the Rabe House, heighten the theatrical experience by creating an ambiguity with Schlemmer's fictional installations that he overlaid throughout the domestic spaces of Adolf Rading's design. Schlemmer had taught at the Bauhaus between 1921 and 1929 where he led the theater workshop from 1923 and developed a course titled Der Mensch, and then at the Breslau Academy of Arts, where his colleagues included Rading and other leading modern architects. Schlemmer's costumes restricted, restructured, and redefined bodily movement out of and into architectural space while the props made the dancers' movements visual.
