Bauhaus school lets guests live the avant-garde
An attraction for design nerds, city is home to iconic German architecture
DESSAU, GERMANY— Waking up and walking over to a big picture window, I peer down at the early morning activity six flights below my room. People are hanging around the greyand-red front doors of the school building below, emblazoned above in candid simplicity: Bauhaus.
Young people run in and out of an adjacent café, moving in groups around the campus. But these aren’t students — at least, not of the Bauhaus School — which closed in 1933.
Part museum, part exhibition space and part hostel, Bauhaus Dessau is an immersive way to learn about Germany’s iconic design movement.
With recently refurbished dormitories as an overnight option for the design nerds who flock here, the Bauhaus school lets guests live like a Bauhausler while exploring this former sanctuary of the avant-garde.
Iconically, the school buildings here are designed by the group’s founder and Bauhaus School director Walter Gropius.
From floor tiles to light fixtures, everything speaks to the Bauhaus design. Even the wall colours, in offkilter combinations of pale pink, yellow and grey have been restored to resemble the original interiors.
The Bauhaus School was invited to Dessau in the late 1920s when conservative political powers cut off its funding in Weimar.
The group has left an indelible mark on this small east German town, which is still dappled with historical, cubic buildings that were erected during the Bauhaus era.
As modernist innovators, the group sought to incorporate design into the everyday, fusing beauty with functionality. Artists, architects and designers came together in the Bauhaus School, aiming to create welldesigned products that could be affordable and mass produced, while also experimenting in the fine arts.
Walking through the halls of the Bauhaus building and observing the furniture on display, it’s easy to forget it was created in the 1930s, as so much of the Bauhaus style still permeates contemporary design.
The paradox is starkly illustrated when visiting a restored “student room.”
The space is outfitted with a concrete floor, single bed, a desk and two stylish steel-legged side tables. It could easily be the interior decorating choices of a minimalist millennial, until one notices the windup gramophone atop a side table.
The auditorium is another highlight; an incredibly impressive room in silvers and pinks where the school once showcased performances and hosted rowdy parties.
The Bauhaus School also included an element of performance art and dance.
Oskar Schlemmer, who created the famous Triadisches Ballett, taught at the school. A permanent exhibit is also housed here, and photographs show performers in Schlemmer’s Pantomime Treppenwitz, posed in elaborate, masked costumes on the roof of the same building.
It all gives the exhibit a particularly unique feeling of context.
The winds of politics shifted against the Bauhaus’s favour again in 1932, when the Nazis took over Dessau’s municipal government.
The Bauhaus School, which the Nazi’s labelled as a breeding ground for “degenerate art” was soon closed. Although they loathed the Bauhaus movement, from a standpoint of practicality they needed the buildings and thus the original Bauhaus structures endured through the Second World War despite heavy bombing.
Restoration of the buildings began in the mid-1970s under the GDR, and lasted in some facet until 2006. Ten years later, amid the early morning bustle, the school once again performs its function. Grace Lisa Scott’s trip was sponsored by the German National Tourist Board, which didn’t review or approve this story.