Hannes Meyer, the second director of the Bauhaus, believed that architecture should serve the needs of the people, not the egos of architects, and the five apartment buildings he designed with Bauhaus students in Dessau-Törten in 1929 and 1930 are an expression of that belief. The Laubenganghäuser, houses with balcony access, are three-storey brick buildings with external walkways along the facades giving access to the apartments, a cheap and efficient way to provide affordable housing for workers. The buildings on Peterholzstraße were added to the UNESCO listing of the Bauhaus and its sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau in 2017.
The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 and moved to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed the famous Bauhaus building, a landmark of modern architecture, with its glass curtain wall and asymmetric wings. Nearby, the Masters' Houses, where the teachers, including Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger, lived, are also open to visitors. In Törten, the Bauhaus also built a housing estate of small row houses designed by Gropius, and the Konsum building, a shop and apartment block.
Dessau lies at the confluence of the Mulde and the Elbe, in Saxony-Anhalt, and the surrounding area is part of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, a UNESCO site, a landscape of parks, gardens and palaces created in the late eighteenth century by Prince Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau, inspired by the English landscape garden. The park at Wörlitz, with its lakes, bridges, temples and palace, is one of the finest of its kind in Europe.
For riders, the area offers flat, easy riding through farmland, forests and floodplains, with gentle curves and little traffic outside the towns. The Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve, along the river, has meadows, oak forests and beavers. Further south, the Harz mountains offer more challenging roads.
Dessau, a city of over seventy thousand people about four kilometres away, has fuel, shops and restaurants. The region's cuisine is hearty and simple: try a plate of Soljanka, a sour soup of East European origin popular in eastern Germany, or roast meat with potato dumplings and red cabbage. And as you ride past the plain brick buildings of Törten, take a moment to appreciate the idealism behind them, a belief that good design should be for everyone.