The Wall-Painting Workshop
Hinnerk Scheper studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar before becoming one of its “young masters” — students who stayed on or returned to teach after completing their training. In 1925, as the school prepared to move to Dessau, Walter Gropius appointed him to lead the wall-painting workshop in the new building. It was a significant assignment: the Gropius-designed campus was under construction, and the workshop would contribute directly to the completed building.
Scheper’s approach treated colour as a functional rather than a decorative element in architecture. Colour could accentuate structural features, distinguish zones by use, guide circulation through a complex building, and alter the apparent dimensions of a space. This was not a theoretical position he arrived at independently; it drew on colour theory from Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky while directing those ideas toward practical application. The workshop was not producing paintings or murals in the traditional sense. It was making buildings more legible.
The Dessau Building
For the Bauhaus building itself, Scheper designed a comprehensive colour scheme and an orientation plan, completed in 1926. The plan assigned strong primary and contrasting colours to staircases, corridors, and circulation areas — a navigational system that let users orient themselves within a complex of interconnected wings: workshop block, technical school, studio building, bridge. The studio building and technical school received the most developed treatment; some areas remained whitewashed, either by choice or because of budget constraints. Alfred Arndt collaborated on related colour work in the Masters’ Houses nearby.
The orientation plan is one of the most concrete surviving demonstrations of Bauhaus colour theory applied to a complete building. It shows colour doing a specific job — identifying zones, marking transitions, making a building legible without signage — rather than providing visual interest as an end in itself. Current restoration work on the Dessau building has drawn on Scheper’s original drawings and plans.
The Soviet Period
In 1929 Scheper took leave from the Bauhaus to work in the Soviet Union with his wife Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, also from the wall-painting workshop. They established and ran Maljarstroj, a state consulting centre for colour design in Moscow, and taught at Vkhutemas. The work included colour schemes for major buildings, among them the Narkomfin communal house. In 1930 the two published the essay “Architecture and Color,” originally in a Soviet trade journal, which extended their functional colour methodology into the context of large-scale social housing and urban planning.
Scheper returned to the Bauhaus and continued through the Berlin phase until the school closed in 1933. He spent the following decades working as a monument conservator and restorer in Berlin, applying a related attentiveness — this time to what already existed rather than to what was being built.