The Werkbund and the Bauhaus

Germany became the centre of the new architecture. The Werkbund, the Bauhaus and the housing of the Weimar Republic shaped modernism – until the Nazis drove the architects into exile.

Peter Behrens’s turbine hall for AEG of 1909 gave industry a monumental form. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and in 1925 the school moved to Dessau, where he designed its building with glass walls. In Frankfurt Ernst May built thousands of homes in new suburbs.

The Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart of 1927 brought together Europe’s modernists, and Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam showed an expressionist path. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, and Gropius and Mies van der Rohe moved to the USA.

• AEG Turbine Factory
• The Bauhaus Building