Building the School
The Bauhaus building in Dessau was commissioned by the city on June 22, 1925, after political opposition in Thuringia had forced the school out of Weimar. Walter Gropius led the design with associates including Carl Fieger, Ernst Neufert, Otto Meyer-Ottens, and Bernhard Sturtzkopf. Construction moved quickly: the shell was topped out on March 21, 1926, student studios were occupied on September 1, and the building officially opened on December 4, 1926.
The speed of the project reflected both the institutional urgency — the school needed a home — and the municipal commitment of Dessau’s mayor, Fritz Hesse, who saw the Bauhaus as a cultural and economic asset. The result was not just a building but an argument: that the school’s pedagogical principles could be realized in built form, and that architecture and education could shape each other.
The Complex
The building is not a single structure but an asymmetrically zoned complex. A three-storey workshop wing features one of the earliest large-scale glass curtain walls, using crystal mirror glass that makes the internal steel-frame structure visible from outside. A five-storey block called the Preller House contains twenty-eight student and master studios. A two-storey administrative bridge connects the workshop wing to a separate block. And a single-storey festive area houses the auditorium, canteen, stage, and vestibule — the social spaces where the school’s communal life took place.
The structural system is an iron-concrete frame with brick infill, and the exterior was originally finished with Keim mineral paints. But what made the building famous — and what continues to define its image — is the glass curtain wall on the workshop wing. Widely photographed from the air and from the ground, reproduced in Bauhaus publications and in architectural histories ever since, this facade became the most recognizable visual symbol of the school and of early modernist architecture more broadly.
Made by Its Own Workshops
One of the building’s most significant features is less visible than the glass wall: the interiors and furnishings were produced by the school’s own workshops. Hinnerk Scheper designed the color schemes. Marcel Breuer designed the furniture. Marianne Brandt and others from the metal workshop produced the lighting. The building was not just a container for the Bauhaus; it was a product of it. The workshops that operated inside the building had also fitted it out, making the complex a demonstration of the integrated design practice the school advocated.
This integration extended to how the building functioned in daily life. The workshops were not isolated classrooms; they were working spaces connected to living quarters, communal areas, and administrative functions. The building’s asymmetric plan — different wings for different activities, linked by bridges and corridors — was a spatial expression of the school’s belief that art, craft, technology, and life should not be separated into discrete zones.
Three Directors, One Building
The building served as the institutional core of the Dessau Bauhaus from its opening in 1926 until the school’s closure in 1932. During those six years, it housed the school under all three of its directors: Gropius until 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1932. Each directorship brought different priorities and different workshop cultures, but the building remained the constant physical framework within which those changes played out.
On August 22, 1932, the Nazi-controlled Dessau city council voted to close the school, effective October 1. Mies moved the Bauhaus to Berlin, but the building stayed behind — a structure designed for a specific pedagogical program, now emptied of the institution it was built to serve.
Damage and Preservation
The building was damaged by bombing in March 1945. Major restorations followed in 1976 and again between 1996 and 2006, with careful attention to the original materials, colors, and spatial relationships. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996, with the listing extended in 2017 to include additional Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and Bernau.
Today the building operates under the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau as a center for research, teaching, and exhibitions. It is both a working institution and a preserved artifact — a building that continues to be used for purposes related to the ones it was designed for, nearly a century after it opened.
The building is sometimes treated as though it alone explains the Bauhaus. It does not. The school existed for six years before the Dessau complex was built, and it continued for another year after leaving it. But as a physical realization of the Bauhaus idea — the integration of workshops, studios, living spaces, and communal areas into a single architectural ensemble — it remains the most complete and most legible expression of what the school was trying to do.