Henry van de Velde was a Belgian painter turned designer, and he is the reason Weimar has a building that looks like the future of 1906. The Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar brought him here to reform the local art and craft school, and in 1904 he designed a new school building for it, a plain, bright structure with big windows, clean lines and a staircase of studied elegance, in the Art Nouveau style that Germans call Jugendstil. When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, he merged it with this school and took over its building, so the walls that housed one tradition passed to the next with hardly a change of paint.
The two periods are linked by one idea, that design should serve life rather than decoration, and the same building witnessed both. Inside, light floods in through the north-facing studios, and the staircase, with its curved balustrade and stained walls, is an object lesson in how to be modern without being cold. Students such as Oskar Schlemmer painted murals here, and one of them, painted on the staircase, was destroyed by the Nazis in the 1930s, then restored after the war. The building is part of the Bauhaus University today, and parts of it can be visited on guided tours.
Weimar is a gentle city for a rider on foot, with a compact old town and a park running along the Ilm river. Goethe's house stands on the Frauenplan, the library of Duchess Anna Amalia has a rococo hall whose books survived a serious fire in 2004, and the cafés on the market square serve Thuringian cake and strong coffee. Thuringian dumplings, known as Klöße, appear on every menu with roast meat and red cabbage. The surrounding countryside is calm and rolling, with fields, orchards and wooded hills, and roads that run through small villages with red roofs and church towers.
Parking in the centre is tight, so leave the bike on the edge and walk. Weimar has about sixty-five thousand people, with fuel on the ring road and in the surrounding villages. Weekends in summer are busy with tour groups, and the best time to enjoy the town is a weekday morning in spring or autumn, when the light is soft and the streets are quiet. The Onion Market in October is lively and worth a detour.