The Bauhaus building in Dessau is a glass box that changed the way the world builds. Walter Gropius designed it in 1925 and 1926 for the school he had moved here from Weimar, and the structure combines workshops, classrooms, a studio block and a theatre in a plan that looks like a pinwheel from above. The famous feature is the glass curtain wall on the workshop wing, which hangs in front of the structure like a transparent skin, one of the first of its kind in the world. Inside, the stairs, the lamps and the lettering carry the look of the movement.
The school lasted only fourteen years in all, and only seven in Dessau, until the Nazis forced it to close in 1932. In those years, it brought together artists and designers including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who experimented with the idea that good design should be for everyone, and that art, craft and industry could work together. Chairs, lamps, textiles, typefaces and buildings from the school are still copied. UNESCO listed the Bauhaus buildings in Weimar and Dessau in 1996.
The building was damaged in the Second World War, neglected in the East German period, and carefully restored after reunification, and today you can walk through the studios, the canteen and the stage. A visit takes around an hour, and a guided tour explains how the spaces were used. Students still live in the studio block.
Dessau is a medium-sized city of about seventy-seven thousand people, on the Mulde and Elbe rivers in Saxony-Anhalt, and it has fuel, food and rooms. The Garden Realm of Dessau-Worlitz, an eighteenth-century landscape park listed by UNESCO, is close by, and its roads are flat and pleasant on a bike. Parking at the Bauhaus is easy, and the area is quiet outside peak hours. Spring and autumn are the nicest times to go, with soft light on the glass.