Without realising beforehand that this year marks the 90th anniversary of Germany’s most famous design school, I arrived in Dessau – an hour outside of Berlin – on a sticky, humid night last week, unsure of what to expect from the ‘hotel’ section in the original Bauhaus student dormitories.

Climbing three flights of sharp concrete steps to our allocated dorm with a heavy suitcase (no lift, of course) gave me a pretty good idea. A night here will be stark and simple, but also a real treat for the eyes.

Compared to a usual hotel, the dorms were refreshingly uncomplicated – and a Bauhaus aficionado’s dream. Low beds, imitation Breuer tubular steel chairs, angle-poise desk lamps and red lino floors – and featuring the original lever-operated windows and ‘mini’ balconies that spill over the outside. Being over six feet tall, the balcony’s handrail was somewhere around the top of my thigh – no doubt a present-day health and safety inspector’s nightmare. In fact, a note warns that you ‘use the balcony at your own risk’. But I’m glad they weren’t forced to raise the bar to satisfy some H&S jobsworth – the straightforward design is still striking and it’s an absolute thrill to not be hemmed in as you peer over the side.

After a comfortable, if somewhat noisy night (the rooms aren’t soundproofed, so you can hear every door in the corridor open and close) we came downstairs to breakfast in the The Mensa (dining room). This vast room connects the school and working areas to the dormitories (and doubled up as an extended performance space), and is laid out with no-nonsense sturdy white tables and Breuer stools. I bought a bowl of muesli and a couple of brötchen (rolls) for a few euros (breakfast, it seems, is as simple as the surrounding design) while I gazed up at the stunning red, white and black ceiling. They’ve restored the bold colour arrangement and subtle use of paint, and I love it – it’s a timeless example of how not to overdo it.

Touring the building, all information panels are helpfully displayed in English, and a small pictorial history of the building in the basement was particularly interesting. This documented the art movement’s beginnings in Weimar, the move to Dessau and the construction of the present building in 1925, to its closure by the Nazis in 1933 (the school’s design principles, even its flat roofs, were labelled “un-German”). It also followed its devastating decline in the post-war years, and its gradual restoration over the past 30 years.

My limited German prevents me from commenting on the quality of the tour guide, but translation was unnecessary as he pointed out the quirky details of the building. Examples include recesses cut into the walls behind the doors to the auditorium for the spherical door handles to fit snugly into (and to allow a complete view through the building to the stage when the doors are open) and radiators positioned near the ceiling in the stairwell. Was this an ingenious method of heating the floor above, I thought? Not quite. “The reason why the radiator is so far up the wall,” my other half, Christina, translated from the guide’s explanation, “is because they wanted to show it off to people looking in from outside.” Ah, of course. Radiators were rarely seen in the 1920s, so why not flaunt them? Aesthetic wins every time.

Images Christina Günther

To mark the 90th anniversary of Bauhaus, a new exhibition begins in Berlin later this month, which will join together the three major Bauhaus Institutions. Modell-Bauhaus will feature new works, as well artefacts that were taken to North America by Bauhaus exiles and donated to museums.

Further information, visit:
www.bauhaus-dessau.de
www.modell-bauhaus.de