Bauhaus Dessau: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

The Bauhaus Dessau building (1925–26) was Walter Gropius's manifesto in glass and concrete, built after Weimar politics forced the school out and Dessau's industrialists took it in. This mix traces the Behrens office training and De Stijl agitation behind its curtain wall, the Dessau industry that paid for it, and the design schools that rebuilt its curriculum after 1945.

The Kynda mix for Bauhaus Dessau

• Key Influence · AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin by Peter Behrens (1909). Gropius worked as an assistant in Behrens's Berlin office from 1908 to 1910, alongside Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. The Turbine Factory's monumental glazing and its frank treatment of industrial production as architecture's proper subject set the terms Gropius pursued at Fagus and then at Dessau, where the workshop wing's three-storey glass curtain wall is a factory motif turned into a school. Behrens also modelled the architect as total designer of industry.
• Influencia Obscura · Haus am Horn, Weimar by Georg Muche (1923). The only building realised during the Bauhaus's Weimar years was designed by a painter: Muche won the internal competition for the 1923 exhibition house, with Adolf Meyer's office detailing it. Its square plan around a top-lit living hall, and its workshop-made fittings, were the school's first proof that teaching could produce buildings. Dessau is the institutional sequel — the same logic of school-as-building-site, scaled to a campus.
• Local Roots · Junkers F 13 by Hugo Junkers (1919). Dessau courted the homeless Bauhaus because the town was Junkers's company town: the world's first all-metal airliner was built there, and Junkers's corrugated duralumin construction gave the city its reputation for industrial modernity. Mayor Fritz Hesse argued the school would reconcile Dessau's factories with its Anhalt court heritage, and Junkers works supplied the industrial context for Gropius's metal and glass detailing.
• Beyond the Medium · Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky (1926). Published as Bauhaus Book 9 in the year the Dessau building opened, Kandinsky's treatise systematised his teaching in the school's preliminary course and mural workshop, reducing composition to elementary points, lines and planes. That pedagogy of basic elements is the intellectual counterpart to Gropius's assembly of distinct functional volumes, and Kandinsky's wall-painting workshop set the colour schemes inside the building itself.4
• Peer · German Pavilion, Barcelona by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1929). Mies trained in Behrens's office with Gropius, directed the Werkbund's 1927 Weissenhof estate, and succeeded Hannes Meyer as Bauhaus director in 1930 — running the school from Gropius's Dessau building until the Nazis closed it in 1932. The Barcelona Pavilion's free plan of planes, chrome columns and plate glass is the same curtain-wall modernism pursued toward luxury rather than pedagogy.
• Key Collaborator · Haus Fieger, Dessau by Carl Fieger (1927). Fieger worked in Gropius's private office from 1911 and was the draftsman most responsible for working out the Dessau building's drawings, including its glass facade detailing; he later built the Kornhaus restaurant on the Elbe. His own tiny white house with a curved front, erected near the Masters' Houses, is the Dessau idiom in the hands of the man who drew it, and a rare chance to credit the office behind the signature.
• Legacy · Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, campus building by Max Bill (1955). Bill, a Dessau Bauhaus student from 1927 to 1929, became founding rector of the Ulm School of Design and built its hillside campus as a deliberate postwar successor: workshops, studios and student housing in exposed concrete, organised around a preliminary course descended from the Bauhaus Vorkurs. Ulm carried the Dessau model of school-as-laboratory into industrial design for German industry.

What influenced Bauhaus Dessau

• Fagus Factory by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (1911). The account traces characteristics of the later building to elements used at the Fagus Factory. “As early as 1911, Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer jointly designed the Fagus Factory in Alfeld (Leine). They used elements that would later become characteristic and determine the style:” (Wikipedia)
• Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts building, Weimar by Henry van de Velde (1906). Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts building, Weimar (Henry van de Velde) — titan for Bauhaus Dessau “=== History === ==== Background ==== The Bauhaus was renamed and reorganized in 1919 under the new management of Walter Gropius, who succeeded Henry van de Velde, as the successor institution to the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School founded i…” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin (1920). Monument to the Third International (Vladimir Tatlin) — culture for Bauhaus Dessau (wikidata.org)
• Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow by Piet Mondrian (1930). Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (Piet Mondrian) — culture for Bauhaus Dessau (wikidata.org)
• Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky (1926). Point and Line to Plane (Wassily Kandinsky) — culture for Bauhaus Dessau (openlibrary.org)
• Haus am Horn, Weimar by Georg Muche (1923). Haus am Horn, Weimar (Georg Muche) — ghost for Bauhaus Dessau “The so-called Steel House (Stahlhaus) was built in 1926/1927 and was a joint work by Richard Paulick and the Bauhaus master Georg Muche.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Glass Pavilion, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition by Bruno Taut (1914). Glass Pavilion, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (Bruno Taut) — titan for Bauhaus Dessau
• Counter-Construction (Maison particulière axonometrics) by Theo van Doesburg (1923). Counter-Construction (Maison particulière axonometrics) (Theo van Doesburg) — ghost for Bauhaus Dessau
• AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin by Peter Behrens (1909). AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin (Peter Behrens) — titan for Bauhaus Dessau

Peers and kindred spirits

• Walter Gropius. The building was constructed to Gropius's plans. (also via Fagus Factory) “The building was constructed between 1925 and 1926 according to plans by Walter Gropius as a school building for the Bauhaus School of Art, Design and Architecture.” (Wikipedia)
• German Pavilion, Barcelona by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1929). German Pavilion, Barcelona (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) — peer for Bauhaus Dessau “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had studios converted into large classrooms in 1930.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Bauentwurfslehre (Architects' Data) by Ernst Neufert (1936). Bauentwurfslehre (Architects' Data) (Ernst Neufert) — collaborator for Bauhaus Dessau “Edition Bauhaus Dessau.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• ADGB Trade Union School, Bernau by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer (1930). ADGB Trade Union School, Bernau (Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer) — geography for Bauhaus Dessau “Hans Emil "Hannes" Meyer (18 November 1889 – 19 July 1954) was a Swiss architect and second director of the Bauhaus Dessau from 1928 to 1930.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Haus Fieger, Dessau by Carl Fieger (1927). Haus Fieger, Dessau (Carl Fieger) — collaborator for Bauhaus Dessau “The house, built in the summer of 1927, is the only realised design by Carl Fieger from a series of plans for small houses that were to be built using a rational construction method with versatile rooms.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Club Chair B3 (Wassily Chair) by Marcel Breuer (1925). Club Chair B3 (Wassily Chair) (Marcel Breuer) — collaborator for Bauhaus Dessau “The school had planned and carried out large parts of the furnishings themselves: Furniture and fixtures came from the carpentry workshop (seating in the assembly hall by Marcel Breuer).” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Villa Savoye, Poissy by Le Corbusier (1931). Villa Savoye, Poissy (Le Corbusier) — peer for Bauhaus Dessau
• Van Nelle Factory, Rotterdam by Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt (1931). Van Nelle Factory, Rotterdam (Johannes Brinkman and Leendert van der Vlugt) — peer for Bauhaus Dessau
• Schloss Wörlitz and the Wörlitz Park by Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff (1773). Schloss Wörlitz and the Wörlitz Park (Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff) — geography for Bauhaus Dessau
• Junkers F 13 by Hugo Junkers (1919). Junkers F 13 (Hugo Junkers) — geography for Bauhaus Dessau

Who Bauhaus Dessau influenced

• Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, campus building by Max Bill (1955). Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, campus building (Max Bill) — legacy for Bauhaus Dessau
• Braun SK 4 Phonosuper by Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot (1956). Braun SK 4 Phonosuper (Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot) — legacy for Bauhaus Dessau