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It granted, for instance, an interest-free loan to make the Bauhaus’s relocation from Weimar to Dessau more easily bearable. Furthermore the Society, whose membership grew to approximately five hundred in Dessau, financed the magazine Bauhaus, which was published beginning in December 1926, bought Bauhaus products, organised lectures as well as musical and theatre performances, initiated publications and arranged for annual gifts for the Bauhaus artists. The support also related to the provision of larger amounts or subsidies, for example for the free student meals.

      The Bauhaus Becomes an Academy

      In the autumn of 1926 – the new school building had not yet been opened – the constitution was published. From that time, the Bauhaus was recognised by the Anhalt state government as the Academy of Design. Thus the Masters were henceforth called professors and the pupils, who now had the opportunity to gain the Bauhaus diploma, became students. The aims of the school were clearly defined in the constitution: first, “to shape the intellectual, crafts and technical abilities of creatively-talented human beings to equip them for design work, particularly construction”, and second “to perform practical experiments, notably in housing construction and interiors, as well as to develop model types for industry and manual trades.”

      The holistic and comprehensive Bauhaus pedagogy was continued and reinforced. In Weimar the institution had been regarded as a pedagogical project for which the prestigious School for Arts and Crafts was a forerunner. The city of Dessau had remarkable school traditions to offer as well. A 1927 edition of the newspaper Dessauer Zeitung effusively reminded its readers of a “… Dessau Bauhaus 130 years ago” and referred to the General Preparatory Education Establishment for Mechanical Trades and Fine Arts for Dessau planned by the classicist architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff (1736–1800) in the eighteenth century. The Dessau Philanthropin, one of the most important schools founded in the eighteenth century, can in the broadest sense be seen as a regional forerunner of the Bauhaus on the basis of noticeable intellectual correlations. The Dessau education system, too, did not remain uninfluenced in the following period by these rich educational, political and reformist pedagogical traditions. In the second half of the 1920s there was, for instance, talk of a time of “pedagogical reforms and new reorganisation”, while “student practical education, independence and self-administration, connection of individual subjects, physical education, [and] teacher co-operation” were seen as “new values”.[5] The Bauhaus, that experimental school from Weimar which was very aware of this tradition, was able to continue this.

      Apart from preparatory courses and workshop education there was also more complex instruction in natural science subjects as well as sports at the Dessau Bauhaus. In 1927, Walter Gropius was finally successful in appointing the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who would subsequently build and head the architecture department. Finally it was officially possible to educate architects in a two-level programme involving the completion of a builder’s apprenticeship and work in the building studio. The lack of a building department or an architecture class as an appropriate conclusion of the Bauhaus curriculum had been recognised as a defect from the beginning. It was only later, with the establishment of an architecture department and the recognition of its academy status, that a renewed change of the teaching profile was brought about. Architecture was now above everything else. Almost all workshops were combined in the department of “Construction and Interior Furnishing.” The advertising and, finally, the theatre departments remained separate areas. To this the “Seminar for Free Sculpting and Painting Design” was added, a course which was mainly run by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and later continued as a “Free Painting Class.”[6]

      Laboratories for Industry – Workshop Work

      Balanced economic and pedagogical considerations had preceded the structural changes as well as reorganisation of the curriculum in 1929. Among other things, this resulted in the fact that some of the Weimar workshops such as stained glass, painting, and bookbinding were not reinstated in Dessau. The stone sculpture and woodcarving department became a plastic workshop and the graphic printing department was replaced by the printing and advertising workshop. While it was possible in the new Dessau building to renovate the remaining workshops partially according to modern ideas, this was not true for the ceramics workshop, which was not continued in Dessau.

      The interim solution in the city described earlier ended in October 1926 when the workshops moved into the Bauhaus building. After the opening of the new school building with its attendant publicity in December of the same year, all practical, manual trade subjects could be more strictly systematised and even more impulses from science could be picked up. With the orientation of workshop education towards industrial design, Gropius’s principle of “nature research” was raised to a didactic model. According to it, a thing is defined “by its nature. In order to design it so that it functions – a container, a chair, a house – its nature must first be researched.”[7] This approach was one of the things that created completely new jobs at the end of individual educational paths. The Bauhaus attempted to conceive serial production appropriate for industrial manufacture in the so-called “laboratory workshops”, which were to be offered as high-quality and affordable mass products to a broad class of consumers. A precondition to the purchase of such furniture and objects for daily use, however, was the potential buyer’s declared aesthetic belief in an industrially-based culture. Appropriate PR work was launched which included a stronger use of Bauhaus Ltd, which had been founded in 1925. It was mostly concerned with the marketing process for the products developed in the Bauhaus and with furthering collaboration with industry.

      Industry and the beginning of urban construction were thus the focus of interest for the Bauhaus in Dessau. The central German industrial zone in which the Bauhaus had established itself offered more opportunities than ever before to push the combination of art and technology into a “new unity”, and to connect the technical know-how of industrial production with the aesthetic modernism of the Bauhaus designs. But a broader collaboration between the Bauhaus as a “laboratory for industry” (as Gropius put it) and sectors of the industrial economy did not come about. Comprehensive collaboration with the gas device and aircraft manufacturer Junkers, for instance, would have been obvious in many areas, such as dwelling construction, aircraft interior furnishing, advertising and marketing or furniture construction. But the collaboration was reduced to individual projects and partial influencing. The reasons for this may have been less the lack of mutual support and respect than the differing economic interests of the company and the school, as well as the competitive situation which was eventually created by the avant-garde exploratory spirit of both parties.

      Masters of the Bauhaus on the roof of the Bauhaus building on the December 4th, 1926, photograph taken using automatic shutter release (l-r: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer)

      Planning and Building

      The opportunity to build was one of the decisive reasons for Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus moving to Dessau. Here, many Bauhaus projects for which the city or co-operatives acted as clients could be carried out from the beginning. On the basis of this, municipal as well as residential buildings were created in rapid succession between 1925 and 1929, for which architect and Bauhaus director Walter Gropius coined the name “Bauhaus buildings.” Designed in Gropius’s private construction offices or together with teachers and students at the school and executed by regional contractors as well as in the Bauhaus workshops, a broad spectrum of modern architecture was created which to this day attracts interested visitors from all over the world. This includes the Bauhaus building itself, the Masters’ houses, the former unemployment office and housing developments in Törten, a district in the south of the city. Yet Gropius’s buildings, especially the housing developments in Törten, were extremely controversial at the time. Problems of structural physics and finance, as well as aesthetic aspects, were intensely discussed in daily newspapers and technical publications of the mid 1930s. In the articles, objectively existing defects reported by the inhabitants

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