The heat hits me as soon as I open the door, the single panes of glass in the wall-width window drawing the late afternoon sunlight into my room. The red linoleum floor and minimalist interior do little to soften the impact; I wonder how I’m going to sleep. On the opposite side of the corridor, another member of the group I’m travelling with has a much cooler studio, complete with a small balcony that I immediately recognise from archive black and white photographs.
Unconsciously echoing the building’s past, we start using this as a common room, perching on the tubular steel chairs, browsing the collection of books on the desk and discussing what it must have been like to live here. At night, my room stays warm and noise travels easily through the walls and stairwells; it’s not the best night’s rest I’ve ever had, but it’s worth it for the experience.
I’m in Dessau, Germany, in the accommodation block once inhabited by students and junior masters at the famous Bauhaus school. Also known as the Prellerhaus, the studios are part of a larger asymmetrical complex of connected workshops, classrooms and social spaces – the iconic Bauhaus Building.
Designed by German architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius after the school moved here in 1925, and completed in 1926, the revolutionary structure is a mix of glass, steel and concrete. It was a physical expression of the school’s ideas and remains a symbol of European modernism to this day. “It landed here like an alien spaceship,” says Oliver Klimpel, head of the curatorial workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
Founded in Weimar in 1919, the highly influential school rejected the principles of local and traditional architecture and design and pursued those that were simple, rational and functional, using innovative ways of teaching and working. Forced to leave Weimar just six years later, owing to financial and political pressure, the school relocated to Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt – then a rising industrial hub with an entrepreneurial spirit and social democratic government – a century ago this year.
What followed was a highly successful period for the school and a stronger focus on developing prototypes of furniture, household objects and other items for mass production. Art increasingly merged with industry. “They switched from solid wood to plywood sheets, from upholstery to steel tubes and iron yarn,” our guide, Anke John, explains, standing in Gropius’s old office, where the stench from the triolin floor still lingers. It was in Dessau that Marcel Breuer designed the iconic Wassily Chair, for example.
Bauhaus buildings also sprung up across town, before the rise of National Socialism saw the school move again in 1932, this time to Berlin, for one final year before the Nazis came to power.
“The empty rooms in the workshop wing appear clean and spacious now, but they were packed with different workshops for printing, weaving, woodwork and metalwork, with tools and machines; it was messy and loud, a maker’s space,” explains Klimpel, adding that the common portrayal of a perfectionist modernist practice in an art school can be very misleading.
While regular heatwaves were less of a problem in the 1920s – temperatures were in the high 30s when I visited – the three-storey glass curtain wall, in pursuit of transparency, still created difficult, greenhouse-like conditions in summer. “It was part of the practical research to see what worked and what didn’t; you learned with the building and lived within the experiment,” adds Klimpel.
The structure has undergone changes over time, including repairs to wartime bomb damage, reconstruction of the facade in 1976, and an extensive restoration project based on the original plans, completed in 2006. Today it’s home to a shop, a cafe, exhibition spaces and the offices of the non-profit Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. The students’ studios are open to overnight guests, each one kitted out with Bauhaus-inspired furniture, some in the style of former residents such as Josef Albers (studio 204) and Marianne Brandt (studio 302).
Visitors can also head to other Bauhaus-related locations in town using a signposted cycle route, taking the number 10 bus (the Bauhauslinie) or by joining a guided tour. I start by walking over to the restored Masters’ Houses, just a short distance away from the Bauhaus Building. Set among towering oaks and pines, these cubic-like white structures with black window frames, plus two abstract rebuilds, are where key figures such as Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy and Gropius once lived with their families. It feels sleepy and subdued here now, quiet enough to hear acorns crunching under my feet.
Other spots not to miss include the Kornhaus, a restaurant with a semicircular glazed conservatory on the banks of the Elbe, built in 1929; the Arbeitsamt, the yellow-brick employment office designed by Gropius in 1929; and the Dessau Törten housing estate (1926-28), with its rows of modest two-storey, flat-roofed homes, developed to address the housing shortage. The striking Bauhaus Museum, designed by architects from Barcelona and open since 2019, provides plenty of background information and is home to the second largest collection of Bauhaus-related objects in the world, including teaching notes and drafts from the workshops.
To mark the centenary of the school’s move to Dessau, a programme of events and exhibitions – titled An die Substanz/To the Core – will take place throughout 2025 and 2026, focusing on materials of the modern era. Celebrations kick off this month and include modern interpretations of the so-called Material Dances, part of the course Der Mensch (The Human Being), introduced by Bauhaus teacher Oskar Schlemmer in 1928. Other highlights will include Invisible Bauhaus Dessau, a new digital tour covering the early days of the Bauhaus members in Dessau, and five central exhibitions opening in March 2026.
In between the festivities and the Bauhaus sites, it’s impossible not to notice the decline of this city, which has been merged with Roßlau since 2007. Blocks of GDR flats with worn-down facades are easy to spot and the streets feel quiet, almost deserted, at times. Like many places in eastern Germany, reunification has seen the population shrink, and gradually age. In recent years, the rightwing party Alternative für Deutschland has gained increasing support in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, its influence extending to culture and the Bauhaus.
Coming here requires a degree of imagination and reflection. You have to remind yourself that these buildings and ideas were completely new, occasionally provocative, in the 1920s. That the Bauhaus teachers really lived in those white houses. That the workshops were loud and dusty. That students held wild parties and piled out on to those balconies. That Dessau was once a booming place. That this school from a corner of Germany has found its way into everyday design around the world.
The trip was supported by the German tourist board. For more information about the centenary, see bauhaus-dessau.de. A night at the Bauhaus starts from €55. Toilets, showers and kitchenettes are shared, but found on every floor