Bauhaus dessau

THE BAUHAUS BUILDING BY WALTER GROPIUS
(1925–26)
daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Exhibition
daily 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Admission fee: Euro 4, concessions Euro 3
24 hour ticket: Euro 12, concessions Euro 8
Concessions apply to groups of 10 and more.

With the move from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus had the unique opportunity of creating optimal working conditions in a new building oftheir own design. The building, which was inaugurated on 4th December 1926, rapidly became the icon of Classical Modernism. || Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus in 1919 and its director until 1928, designed the building on behalf of the city of Dessau and in cooperation with Carl Fieger, Ernst Neufert and others in his private architectural practice – the Bauhaus did not have its owndepartment of architecture until 1927. The Bauhaus workshops were integrated within the building’s interior design. The city of Dessau provided money for the new school building on a development site close to the train station and also for the Masters´Houses, and remained the owner of both properties. || In his design, Walter Gropius refined architectonic ideas he first put into practice before WW I inthe construction of the Fagus-Werke in Alfeld an der Leine. In Dessau as in Alfeld, the glass curtain wall suspended in front of the load-bearing framework defines the exterior of the workshop wing and openly shows the constructive elements. Gropius, rather than visually amplifying the corners of the cubic body of the building, allowed the glass surface to overlap the edges, thereby creating theimpression of lightness. || Gropius consistently separated the parts of the Bauhaus building according to their functions and designed each differently. He thereby arranged the different wings asymmetrically – in relation to what is today the Bauhausstraße and the Gropiusallee respectively. In order to appreciate the overall design of the complex, the observer must therefore move around the wholebuilding. There is no central viewpoint. || The glazed, three-storey workshop wing, the block for the vocational school (also three storeys high) with its unostentatious rows of windows, and the five-storey studio building with its conspicuous, projecting balconies are the main elements of the complex. A two-storey bridge which housed, i.e. the administration department and, until 1928,Gropius’s architectural practice, connects the workshop wing with the vocational school. A single-storey building with a hall, stage and refectory, the so-called Festive Area, connects the workshop wing to the studio building. The latter originally featured 28 studio flats for students and junior masters, each measuring 20 m². The façade of the students’ dormitory is distinguished in the east by individualbalconies and in the south by long balconies that continue around the corner of the building. || The entire complex is rendered and painted mainly in light tones, creating an attractive contrast to the window frames, which are dark. For the interior, the junior master of the mural workshop, Hinnerk Scheper, designed a detailed colour plan that, by differentiating between supporting and maskingelements through the use of colour, aimed to accentuate the construction of the building. || Under pressure from the National Socialists, the "Hochschule für Gestaltung" (school of design) at the Bauhaus was closed in 1932. After suffering heavy bomb damage towards the end of the war, the building was provisionally repaired. Designated a protected monument in 1974, it was comprehensively restoredfor the first time in 1976. With its declaration as a World Cultural Heritage Site, it was decided to carry out further extensive restoration, which will be completed in 2006. In 1994, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation was called into existence. The Bauhaus has thereby once more become a vital place for experimental design, research and teaching. Its work concerns the cultivation, research and...