The Bauhaus Building
The Bauhaus school moved from Weimar to Dessau and was given a new building that was a manifesto in itself. The workshop wing has a glass wall hung outside the structural frame, and the building is divided into parts by function – teaching, workshops, studio flats – which meet in an asymmetrical plan.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius as a school where art, craft and industry would be united. The new government in Thuringia was hostile to the school, and in 1925 it moved to the industrial city of Dessau, whose mayor welcomed it. The city paid for a new school building designed by Gropius, which was erected quickly and inaugurated in December 1926. The building has a reinforced-concrete frame with masonry infill walls, and the pale render and large expanses of glass displayed the ideals of the new architecture. The school’s own workshops designed and made much of the furnishings, lighting and signage, so that the building became a demonstration of what the Bauhaus stood for. At the same time the Masters’ Houses for the teachers were built in a nearby pine wood.
The building has no real main façade. It consists of several parts according to function: the workshop wing with the great glass wall, a wing for the city’s vocational school, and a bridge over the street that links them and housed the administration and Gropius’s office. A low section with an auditorium, stage and canteen leads to the studio block, where students lived in small rooms with their own balconies. The plan is asymmetrical, forming a kind of pinwheel, and the building has to be experienced by walking around it. The glass wall hangs outside the concrete frame, so that the corners are made entirely of glass. The interior colour scheme was designed by the school’s wall-painting workshop, and the light fittings were made in the metal workshop. The oblique aerial view became a famous photograph.
Under pressure from the Nazis the school in Dessau was closed in 1932, and its final period in Berlin ended in 1933. The building was then used for other purposes and was damaged in bombing raids in 1945, when the glass wall was destroyed. In the GDR era it was restored for the first time in the 1970s, and after German reunification a more thorough restoration was carried out. Since 1996 the building has been a World Heritage Site together with other Bauhaus sites. Many of the teachers and students fled and spread the school’s ideas around the world, not least in the United States. In Sweden the Bauhaus was important for functionalism and for design, and Swedish architects and artists travelled to Dessau to see the building. Gropius’s ideas about rational building and good design for all had points of contact with the building of the Swedish welfare state, the folkhem.