Housing the Faculty
When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Walter Gropius designed not only the school’s new main building but also a set of faculty residences on a pine-wooded site along Ebertallee, roughly six hundred meters to the northwest. The ensemble consisted of one freestanding director’s house for Gropius himself and three semi-detached duplexes, each shared by two masters. The houses were built simultaneously with the school building in 1925–1926, and they opened for occupancy in the summer of 1926, a few months before the main building’s official inauguration in December.
The occupant pairings reflected the school’s internal structure. László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger shared one duplex; Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer shared another; Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee occupied the third. These were not arbitrary roommates. Each pairing placed two prominent artists and teachers in close domestic proximity, creating a small residential colony where the school’s intellectual and social life continued outside the workshops. The houses were, in a practical sense, an extension of the campus — close enough to walk to work, visible enough to be seen by visitors, and designed with enough intentionality to function as architectural arguments in their own right.
Construction and Materials
The houses share a common structural language: reinforced concrete frames with Jurko brick infill, rendered and painted white. Flat roofs, terraces, and large studio windows define the exterior massing. The plans are organized around the idea that modern dwelling requires a clear separation of working, living, and sleeping zones, with each zone receiving appropriate light and access. The studio windows — tall, multi-paned glazing oriented for maximum north light — are the most visually distinctive feature, signaling that these are not ordinary bourgeois residences but working environments for artists.
Mechanically, the houses were well-equipped for their time. Central heating, Junkers gas stoves, and modern bathroom fittings were standard. The interiors of the Gropius and Moholy-Nagy houses were furnished with Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture, making them among the earliest domestic settings in which those designs appeared. Kandinsky and Klee, characteristically, took a more personal approach: Kandinsky developed a precise color scheme for his rooms, applying color theory to his own walls and ceilings, while Klee’s interior reflected his quieter sensibility. The houses thus served a double function — as living spaces for their occupants and as demonstration environments for the products and ideas emerging from the school’s workshops.
Domestic Architecture as Statement
The Masters’ Houses were never intended as anonymous housing. They were public-facing objects, visited by journalists, architects, and delegations who came to Dessau to see the Bauhaus experiment in action. Photographs of the interiors — Breuer chairs in Gropius’s living room, Kandinsky’s color-coded walls, the clean geometry of the kitchens — circulated widely in architectural publications and helped define the visual vocabulary of Bauhaus domesticity for an international audience.
This visibility made the houses ideologically loaded. They demonstrated that modern architecture could produce not just institutional buildings or factories but livable homes — that the flat roof, the open plan, the white wall, and the tubular steel chair could constitute a credible domestic environment. For skeptics of modernism, the houses were cold and doctrinaire. For advocates, they were evidence that a new way of living was materially possible. The truth, as the occupants themselves experienced it, was more complicated: the flat roofs leaked, the heating was sometimes inadequate, and the close quarters of the duplexes occasionally produced friction between neighbors whose artistic temperaments did not always align.
Destruction and Reconstruction
Two of the houses — the Gropius director’s house and the Moholy-Nagy/Feininger duplex — were destroyed by Allied bombing in March 1945. The remaining houses sustained varying degrees of damage and were used for other purposes during the postwar decades. Restoration began in 1994, when the Muche/Schlemmer duplex was the first to be returned to an approximation of its 1926 appearance.
The most architecturally significant reconstruction came later. In 2014, the firm BFM Architekten completed a new structure on the site of the destroyed Moholy-Nagy/Feininger duplex — not a literal replica but a deliberately abstracted interpretation that used translucent materials to mark the original volumes without pretending to reconstruct vanished interiors. The Gropius director’s house was similarly reinterpreted. These reconstructions acknowledged the impossibility of recovering what was lost while preserving the spatial relationships and urban logic of the original ensemble.
Present and Preservation
The Masters’ Houses have been part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing since the original 1996 inscription of Bauhaus sites in Weimar and Dessau, with the listing extended in 2017 to include additional properties. The Kandinsky/Klee house is now a museum where visitors can see the restored color schemes and spatial arrangements. The ensemble is maintained by the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and remains one of the most visited Bauhaus sites in Germany.
As architecture, the houses are modest in scale but dense in meaning. They document a moment when the school’s ambitions expanded from institutional buildings and workshop products to the fabric of daily life — when the question shifted from “What should a school look like?” to “How should a modern person live?” The answers the houses propose are specific, material, and still legible: light, air, clear spatial organization, and objects designed with the same rigor as the rooms that contain them.