Bauhaus Dessau

Stand still for a moment and look at the glass. A whole wall of it, three storeys high, hangs in front of the workshop wing like a thin, clear curtain. On a bright day it throws back the sky and the trees. On a grey day it turns pale and you can see straight through to the floors and stairs inside. The frames are slim and dark. The plaster around them is a clean, chalky white. Nothing here is carved or gilded. And that simple fact is the whole point of this building.

You are standing at the Bauhaus in Dessau. It was a school of art, design and architecture, and for a few short years it was one of the most influential schools of the twentieth century. The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius. Weimar was a conservative town, and the school soon fell out of favour with local politicians. By the mid-1920s it needed a new home. Dessau, an industrial city in central Germany, offered one.

The invitation came under the city's mayor, Fritz Hesse. Dessau had factories, engineers and a growing working population. That suited a school that wanted to design for industry, not against it. The move happened in 1925. Gropius then designed this new school building himself, and it opened at the end of 1926. For the first time, the Bauhaus could live inside a building that showed its own ideas in concrete, steel and glass.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. This is not one block. It is several wings, each shaped for a different job, joined together like a pinwheel. The glass-fronted wing held the workshops. Another wing held classrooms and a vocational school run by the city. A bridge connects them across the road below. And at the back rises a taller block with small balconies. From the ground, you can never see the whole building at once. You have to walk around it to understand it.

That bridge is worth a closer look. It spans the street on slender supports, and it held the school's administration. Gropius had his own office up there, floating between the two halves of the school. It is a neat piece of symbolism, though nobody needs to explain it. Teaching on one side, practical training on the other, and the people who ran the place sitting right in the middle.

Now turn to the tall block with the balconies. This was the studio building, where students and young teachers lived. Each small room had its own little balcony, a narrow concrete ledge with a simple railing. Old photographs show students leaning out, sitting on the railings, even posing in mid-air for the camera. Living, working, eating and studying all happened under one connected roof. The building was a small town for a new kind of artist.

And here is the second surprise. You can still sleep here. The foundation that cares for the site rents out some of these studio rooms to overnight guests. The furnishings are plain and practical, in the spirit of the original. Imagine waking up, opening the balcony door, and looking out over the same lawns the students saw a century ago.

The people who taught here are a remarkable list. The painters Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee both taught at the Bauhaus. So did László Moholy-Nagy, who experimented with photography and light, and Josef Albers, who later became famous for his studies of colour. In the weaving workshop, Gunta Stölzl led a group of mostly women students who made textiles for industrial production. The school mixed fine art with craft, and it expected both to serve everyday life.

Some of the objects designed here are still part of your daily world, even if you have never heard the word Bauhaus. Marcel Breuer, a former student who became a teacher, developed chairs made of bent steel tube during the Dessau years. Lamps, tea sets, wallpapers and typefaces came out of these workshops. Look at the vertical lettering on the façade, those clean, upright letters spelling the school's name. Even the signage was treated as a design problem.

The school's life in Dessau was short and political. Gropius stepped down in 1928, and the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer took over. He was later dismissed, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became director in 1930. Meanwhile, the National Socialists were gaining power in the city council. They saw the school as foreign and suspicious. In 1932 the council forced the Bauhaus out of Dessau. It moved to Berlin, and in 1933 it closed for good.

But its teachers and students scattered across the world. Many went to the United States, to Britain, to Palestine and elsewhere. They carried flat roofs, open plans and simple furniture with them. The building they left behind had a harder fate. It was damaged by bombing in the Second World War and used for other purposes for decades. A major restoration took place in East Germany in the 1970s, and further careful work followed after reunification.

In 1996, UNESCO listed the Bauhaus sites in Dessau and Weimar as a World Heritage Site. The listing includes not only this school building but also the Masters' Houses, a short walk away along a quiet, tree-lined road. Gropius designed those houses for himself and for senior teachers. They are white, cubic and set among pine trees. In 2019, a separate Bauhaus Museum also opened in the city centre, built to show the large collection of objects from the school.

Before you move on, take one more look at the glass wall. Notice how it changes as you shift your position — reflecting, then revealing, then reflecting again. Listen for the traffic passing under the bridge, and the voices of students who still study in parts of this building today. It is not a museum frozen in place. It is still a working building. And as you walk away, you may start to notice how many plain white walls, steel chairs and simple lamps in the world around you began with an idea tested right here.