Qualla: Bauhaus Dessau

Bauhaus Dessau: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ross Sokolovski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk around it and you will not find the front. Walter Gropius set the reinforced-concrete frames down on a flat field in Dessau in five separate parts, wings hinged at right angles, none of them designated as the face the building shows the world. To take in the whole thing you have to keep moving — or, as the photographers worked out almost immediately, get above it. It was finished in 1926 for a school of art, design and architecture that had just been forced out of Weimar by a state government that found it too foreign, too red, too modern. Six years later, politicians in Dessau closed it too.

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Image: Ross Sokolovski | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bauhaus Dessau: The Glass That Should Not Have Worked

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cethegus, Public domain. The workshop wing is the argument. Gropius set the support columns inward so that nothing structural touched the skin, then hung an uninterrupted glass curtain across all three floors and the entire length of the building. The wall carries no load; it only reveals the frame behin...

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Image: Cethegus | Public domain

Bauhaus Dessau: Made In-House

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M_H.DE, CC BY 3.0. The school furnished itself, which is a more radical statement than it sounds. Marcel Breuer designed the seating for the assembly hall. Gropius specified Rowac stools from Chemnitz throughout the classrooms and workshops. The metal workshop turned out the lamps, mostly under Mar...

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Image: M_H.DE | CC BY 3.0

Bauhaus Dessau: Point One: Demolish It

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spyrosdrakopoulos, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1931 municipal elections the NSDAP took 15 of Dessau's 36 council seats and became the largest party. Their leaflet for the vote of 25 October opened with eight demands, and the first was the Bauhaus: cancel every mark of its funding, dismiss the foreign teachers without n...

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Image: Spyrosdrakopoulos | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bauhaus Dessau: Burned, Rebuilt, Listed

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. A heavy air raid on Dessau in 1945 left the building partly burned and the glass wing wrecked. It was patched up plainly, without the curtain wall, and used for years as a vocational school. In 1976 came a first serious attempt at the original appearance: the glass wall was recon...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Bauhaus Dessau: A City Full of Evidence

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit M_H.DE, CC BY-SA 3.0. The school building is only the centrepiece. Along Ebertallee, Gropius built the Masters' Houses: his own, plus double houses shared by Moholy-Nagy and Feininger, Muche and Schlemmer, Kandinsky and Klee. Radiators were positioned so they would be visible from outside through the ...

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Image: M_H.DE | CC BY-SA 3.0