Dessau Notes

The grid of glass windows across the workshop wing of the Bauhaus building in Dessau.
Bauhaus Dessau, workshop façade. Walter Gropius, 1925–26. Photograph by Gunnar Klack, 2020.

Behind the
workshop glass.

At the Bauhaus in Dessau, a grid of windows makes the workshop wing’s structure visible from the street.

Designed by Walter Gropius and his office, the Bauhaus building opened in 1926 after the school moved from Weimar to Dessau. Its workshops, teaching rooms, canteen and student studios shared a single site.

The workshop wing is wrapped in glass, set in front of the columns that support the building. From the street, the grid reveals the floors inside; from the workshops, it opens a view towards the surroundings.

The glass frontage in this photograph has a history of its own. Damaged in 1945, it was reconstructed in aluminium and glass in 1976.

The school’s workshops also designed furniture and lighting for the building. This issue follows those details, from a tubular-steel chair to books and prints by Bauhaus artists.

Enter the issue

The Dessau
issue.

The Bauhaus began in Weimar in 1919. Its move to Dessau gave the school something it had not had before: a building designed for the way its workshops taught.

The photographs here were taken decades apart. Read them alongside books and prints made in the 1920s. The buildings have changed; the works on paper show what people chose to put into circulation at the time.

In this edition

Reading the building

Dessau, Germany · Walter Gropius and his office · 1925–26

Black-and-white photograph of the Dessau entrance beside a broad grid of workshop windows.
The entrance and the workshop windows, Dessau, May 1990. Photograph by Sludge G.

A building
to walk around.

From this angle the glass reads as a grid drawn on paper. The white strip between the windows runs down to the entrance; the reflection of the opposite wing makes it difficult to tell where the building ends.

Walk a little further and the plan starts to make sense. The three-storey workshop wing is joined to the vocational school by a two-storey bridge. In another direction a low block leads past the stage and canteen to the much taller studios.

Take the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s tour

The glass corner

The frame carries the load. Moving the columns back lets the windows meet at the corner without a heavy masonry pier. From the street you can read the depth of the workshop floor.

The bridge

The site was divided by a road. Gropius crossed it with a bridge wide enough for offices. What looks like a passage between buildings was itself a place to work.

A room of one’s own

The studio building, known as the Prellerhaus, contained 28 living units for students and young masters. Each measured 24 square metres. The projecting balconies give those modest rooms an unmistakable presence outside.

Finding the way

Colour had a job here. Hinnerk Scheper’s wall-painting workshop used it to help people find their way through the complex. At the entrance, a pair of red doors does more than a sign could.

Four workshop studies

Steel tube, glass, ink and paper. Four different ways to make a line.

Tubular-steel chairs with red seat and back bands, arranged beside the windows in Dessau.

A chair in outline

Marcel Breuer’s B3 club chair leaves most of its volume empty. Bands carry the sitter; bent steel tube draws the arms, legs and back. Against a window the frame almost becomes a drawing.

Two table lamps with white glass domes, one with a transparent stem and the other with a metal stem.

Two versions of a lamp

Carl Jakob Jucker’s lamp is on the left, Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s on the right. The domes look alike. Follow the stem down to the base and the two designs come apart: glass reveals the interior; metal conceals it.

The 1925 cover of Die Bühne im Bauhaus, with tall narrow letters and a large black number four.

A stage on paper

Volume four of the Bauhausbücher took the stage as its subject. On the cover, the numeral is almost a piece of scenery: large, solid and pressed up against lettering that seems to rise past it.

Paul Klee’s Tale à la Hoffmann: fine black lines, small figures and architectural shapes over yellow and rose washes.

A line tells a story

In Paul Klee’s Tale à la Hoffmann (1921), a fine line can be a wall, a plant or part of a figure. Stay with it for a moment before deciding what it represents.

Full cover of Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten. Black and blue bars meet around a white numeral seven.

The school
in print.

Plate 07 · Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten, 1925.

A workshop
you could carry.

A visitor to Dessau could see the things being made. A reader elsewhere could open volume seven.

Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy edited the Bauhausbücher. Fourteen volumes appeared between 1925 and 1930. The series gave a workshop, a painter or a stage the space of a whole book.

Volume seven gathered new work from the Bauhaus workshops. Its cover sets two heavy bars against an expanse of pale paper. The horizontal bar holds the title. The upright one carries the number. A reader can find the book in the series before reading a word.

Compare it with volume four, on theatre. The two covers hardly look alike, yet their outsized numerals do the same navigational work. A series could have a recognisable identity without giving every book the same face.

There is another sort of circulation in the notebook below. Joost Schmidt’s poster for the 1923 exhibition was meant to catch a passer-by. A book can wait on a shelf; a poster has to work while someone is walking past it.

Explore the Letterform Archive timeline

Dessau in six details

A photographic walk around the school, from street to stair and back outside.

Through the workshop’s grid of windows, the frame and floors are visible behind the glass.
01 The glazing runs in front of the columns.
Red entrance doors beneath a shallow canopy, seen from the paved forecourt.
02 A red doorway interrupts the grey frontage.
A stair rises between dark red walls towards a bright rectangular landing.
03 Daylight catches the edges of the treads.
Rows of studio windows on a white façade, visible between green trees.
04 The studio windows sit flush with the wall.
Individual concrete balconies project from the student block, seen from below.
05 The balconies cast a second row of rectangles.
The illuminated workshop wing under a deep blue sky, with the vertical Bauhaus sign at its end.
06 At dusk the light comes from inside.

Windows aren’t all alike.

Compare the first and fourth photographs. In the workshops, glass passes in front of the structure. At the studios, separate windows sit in a solid wall. Both façades are grids, but only one follows the scale of a single room.

Inside
Small Worlds

In 1922 Wassily Kandinsky made a portfolio of twelve prints. Each sheet asks the eye to find its own way in.

Print room · Works on paper

Small Worlds VII: yellow curves, pale lines and blue and red marks cross a black field.
Wassily Kandinsky, Small Worlds VII, 1922.

Where does the eye start?

On plate VII, try the yellow arc near the top. Follow it until another mark interrupts it. The black ground makes the pale lines unusually easy to trace; a patch of blue can send the eye in quite another direction.

Why make a portfolio?

Twelve sheets let Kandinsky try changes that a single image cannot show. Put one beside another and the same black shape can behave as a weight, an outline or the space between two colours.

Where does Dessau fit in?

Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922, when the school was still in Weimar. These prints came four years before the Dessau building opened. The resemblance between a window grid and his latticework is something to look for, not a blueprint.

What changes at the press?

The portfolio moves between lithography, woodcut and drypoint. A cut removes material. A scratched plate holds ink in a fine groove. A lithograph gives the artist a surface to draw on. The resulting lines need not look alike.

What happens on white paper?

Compare the dark ground here with plate I in the next spread. There the untouched paper passes between the shapes like light. Cover a strip of that white with your hand and the whole composition feels closer.

Where can I see the series?

MoMA’s collection entry for plate IV places it within the portfolio and describes how Kandinsky moved between the different printing methods.

On the sheet

Kandinsky, Small Worlds I, 1922.

Small Worlds I: angled bands of blue, green and yellow intersect with spare black lines on pale paper.

A long diagonal crosses the page. It meets smaller marks, changes colour and carries on. The eye makes a path between shapes that never actually touch.

The blank paper is part of that path. It gives the densest marks somewhere to open out.

On the wall

Prellerhaus, the Dessau studio building.

A close view up the studio block, with railings, balconies and cast shadows against a blue sky.

Here a thin line really is a railing. A thick one is the edge of a slab. The third belongs to neither: it is a shadow cast by the afternoon sun.

Move from the print to the photograph. The lines look related, but a balcony has to support a person as well as make a mark on a wall.

The notebook

Works to revisit and records worth opening.

Weimar,
summer 1923.

Joost Schmidt arranged the announcement of the Bauhaus exhibition around a head in profile. Look for the small red disc, then trace the curve of the lettering around it.

The date matters: this is a Weimar poster, made before the glass school in Dessau was built.

Joost Schmidt’s 1923 exhibition poster: a geometric head seen in profile, with lettering wrapped around it.
Joost Schmidt, Weimar exhibition poster, 1923.

Read the lettering

Letterform Archive follows the school’s graphic work from its founding to the publication of the books.

Image credits & licences

The photographs and reproductions are stored with this issue. Images have been resized and converted to WebP; some photographs and cover teasers are cropped in the layout. Edited copies of Creative Commons images retain the licence listed with the original.

Architecture, furniture & lighting

Books, posters & works on paper