In the 1920s, the German architect Walter Gropius was asked to design housing for working families, and he approached it as an experiment in how to build well and cheaply. The Bauhaus school had moved to Dessau in 1925, and Gropius used the opportunity to build a whole estate at Torten, on the southern edge of town, with rows of simple concrete houses designed for mass production. A few years later, in 1930, he built a block of balcony-access houses nearby, in which flats were reached by open walkways on the outside rather than by internal stairs, a design that saved space and money.
The balcony-access houses at Torten are among the sites that make up the UNESCO World Heritage listing of the Bauhaus and its sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau, inscribed in 1996. The flats are small and efficient, with clean lines, big windows and flat roofs. Some visitors find them austere, but at the time they were a radical attempt to give ordinary people good light, air and a bit of comfort. The house at Mittelbreite is part of that world.
Dessau itself is a flat, green city on the Elbe and Mulde rivers, with about seventy-seven thousand people. The Bauhaus building, with its glass facade and workshop wing, stands in the middle of town and is the star of the story, and the Masters' Houses, where Gropius, Klee and Kandinsky lived, are set among pine trees. The countryside nearby holds the Garden Realm of Dessau-Worlitz, a landscape of English-style parks and little palaces that was among the first of its kind in Germany.
The riding is flat and easy, with straight roads through farmland, riverside meadows and pine woods, and the surface is good. The Elbe floodplain forest is a biosphere reserve, with oak woods and beavers. Fuel and food are plentiful in Dessau, with Vockerode a small village on the river. Spring and autumn are the best times, with mild air and soft light. Allow time to walk through the estate, and notice how well it has aged.