Paul Sullivan takes a day trip to Dessau to explore the Bauhaus City…
Nestled into the corner of the Mulde and Elbe rivers, the Saxony-Anhalt town of Dessau—Dessau-Rosslau since 2007—is a gentle, inconspicuous place with a big reputation. Aside from its 16th century role as the capital of the Principality of Anhalt (a state of the Holy Roman Empire), and a few decades as the capital of the Free State of Anhalt (1918-1945), it’s today best known for its connection to the Bauhaus architectural movement.
Founded by Walter Gropius in the Thuringian town of Weimar in 1919, the original Bauhaus school was a marriage of arts, crafts and architecture, with a specific emphasis on bridging the gap between applied arts and fine arts—Bauhaus meaning ‘building’ in German, but also a reference to Bauhütte, a pre-modern stonemasons’ guild. The school was more or less immediately successful, morphing quickly into a powerful and global movement by attracting an international set of artists, architects, designers and choreographers: Oskar Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johanes Itten, among them.
Managing to nonetheless ruffle the feathers of Weimar’s conservative municipal authorities, the entire entourage moved to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new main school in a minimalist, internationalist style. It was here that, under the leadership of Hannes Meyer (from 1928) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (from 1930), the Bauhaus worldview began to lean more towards functionalism, architecture and commerce, enjoying what would be its heyday until it was shut down by the Nazis.
Today, Gropius’s strikingly linear, all-white building is just one of around 300 Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, based on designs by well-known names such as Gropius, Kandinsky and Marcel Breuer. Renovated following World War Two and the subsequent division of the country, they are now breezily integrated into the city’s more eclectic range of urban architecture, and range from Carl Fieger’s Kornhaus—a restaurant that sits attractively on the Elbe river—and Gropius’s functionalist yellow-brick Employment Office, to the sprawling Törten Housing Estate, the main Bauhaus Building, and the Masters’ Houses; several of these are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The best starting point for an exploration, though, is a new building: the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, which opened in 2019 to mark the centenary of the movement. A distinctly contemporary building of steel and glass by Barcelona’s addenda architects, it has an impressive exhibition space of 2,100 square meters and hosts the world’s second-largest collection of Bauhaus exhibits: around 50,000 catalogued items.
The spacious ground floor is used as an open stage for contemporary artistic ideas and events (lectures, film screenings, performances), and also hosts the ticket office, and a sleek shop and café. The main exhibition, entitled Versuchsstätte Bauhaus: Die Sammlung—which roughly translates as Experimental Bauhaus: The Collection, a nod to the school’s penchant for creativity and innovation—takes up the entirety of the first floor, which is also known as the Black Box due to its black-painted walls and dramatic spot-lit ambiance.
The curators have not gone for an obvious overview of the school; rather they expect some kind of familiarity with the basics, taking visitors instead on an insider tour of the school’s most significant departments (furnishings, architecture, textiles, lighting) while showcasing a variety of works—some well-known, some obscure—inside large orange cabinets. These cabinets offer slide-out walls and draws that h…