Bauhaus Dessau

It is considered the pinnacle of pre-war modern design in Europe and originated out of the dissolution of the Weimar School and the move by local politicians to reconcile the city's industrial character with its cultural past.

[citation needed] War-damaged and structurally altered sections were largely reconstructed from 1965 onwards in the spirit of the original.

[3] Between 1925 and 1932, various other buildings by Bauhaus architects were also constructed in Dessau, including the Törten housing estate, the employment office and the Kornhaus restaurant.

[4] The building, constructed in the international style,[5] consists of five functionally structured parts, arranged additively in several wings.

The wall's design evoked industrial innovation of a factory building rather than the tradition and civic elevation of an academic institution.

Apart from the then novel functional division of buildings, the most extraordinary feature of the complex, which caused quite a stir in those days, is the glass curtain of the workshop wing.

The support columns were set inward to allow for an uninterrupted glass facade to stretch over all three floors as well as the entire length of the building.

The "open" facade creates a new, also from an educational perspective, effective relationship between the inside and outside, giving the impression of freedom and clarity.

However, the delicate glass facade with its steel frame caused major problems in terms of sun protection and building climate control.

In winter the building cooled down very quickly due to the single pane glass and required extensive heating.

The Bauhaus was renamed and reorganized in 1919 under the new management of Walter Gropius, who succeeded Henry van de Velde, as the successor institution to the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School founded in 1906 by the Grand Duke of Saxony-Weimar.

After the relationship with the increasingly right-wing dominated Thuringian state had become progressively more and more strained, the Bauhaus was forced to close down in 1925 due to political pressure.

The school had planned and carried out large parts of the furnishings themselves: Furniture and fixtures came from the carpentry workshop (seating in the assembly hall by Marcel Breuer).

For the classrooms in the bridge wing as well as the workshops, Walter Gropius decided to use stools exclusively from the Chemnitz-based company Rowac.

He was succeeded by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was unable to keep the Bauhaus out of the political turmoil, despite the school's professional and academic success.

In 1931, a little over a year before Hitler's seizure of power, the NSDAP won 15 of the 36 seats in the municipal elections in Dessau, making it the strongest party.

In their leaflet for the elections on 25 October 1931, the National Socialists support eight points, the first as follows: In the municipal council meeting on 21 January 1932, the NSDAP demanded that the building be demolished.

In the meantime, the voting conditions in the municipal council had changed, so on 22 August 1932, at the request of the NSDAP party, the decision was made to close the building.

In 1945 the building partially burned down after the heavy air raid on Dessau, and the glass facade of the workshop wing was also damaged.

The Bauhaus was used as an educational center by the Office for Industrial Design, whose director Martin Kelm had been strongly committed to its preservation and reconstruction.

Characteristic for the architecture of these houses is their cubic shape featuring a flat roof, their expansive, monochrome surfaces and their large windows, which create a connection between the inside and outside.

In the 1950s, a residential building with a traditional gable roof was built on the foundations of the destroyed Gropius house (Emmer Haus).

Today, the Gropius and Moholy-Nagy Masters' Houses, which were destroyed during the war, have been rebuilt as abstract reinterpretations of the original architecture at the suggestion of the British architect David Chipperfield under the direction of the Berlin office Bruno-Fioretti-Marquez.

The interior walls were designed by conceptual artist Olaf Nicolai with different types of plaster and shades of white, creating a changing impression depending on the incidence of light.

A kiosk (Trinkhalle) built in the neighbourhood of the Masters' Housing Estate according to plans by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was demolished in the 1970s.

[25] The Konsum building (a kind of enclosed department store), designed by Walter Gropius in 1928, became a centre of the Törten housing estate.

These days, the former shop section houses an information centre on the Törten settlement, which offers daily guided tours.

In August 2019, researchers and students from the University of Kassel, under the direction of professor Philipp Oswalt, built a residential building in the Laubengang estate according to the plans of the architect and Bauhaus teacher Ludwig Hilberseimer.

The so-called Steel House (Stahlhaus) was built in 1926/1927 and was a joint work by Richard Paulick and the Bauhaus master Georg Muche.

The Kornhaus sightseeing restaurant was built in 1929/1930 on behalf of the city of Dessau and the Schultheiss-Patzenhofer brewery directly on the Elbe dyke according to plans by Carl Fieger.