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Dessau Made the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus Made Dessau

It was a perfect setting for a movement that wanted to cross over the boundary between art and technology. Today, it survives on a different kind of creativity.
Then-mayor Fritz Hesse agreed that one sixth of all city building contracts would be granted to the school’s members during their stay. It was an accord that left the city not only with an entire quarter (now much altered) of Bauhaus-designed affordable housing, but also such oddities as the unlikely but sparely beautiful Carl Fieger-designed Kornhaus café/restaurant.
Then-mayor Fritz Hesse agreed that one sixth of all city building contracts would be granted to the school’s members during their stay. It was an accord that left the city not only with an entire quarter (now much altered) of Bauhaus-designed affordable housing, but also such oddities as the unlikely but sparely beautiful Carl Fieger-designed Kornhaus café/restaurant.Feargus O'Sullivan

Dessau doesn’t feel like the former mouth of a creative volcano. To enter this pleasant, if somewhat austere, eastern German city by train is to discover somewhere so trim and self-effacing that it seems implausible as the former location of the world-straddling, epoch-shaping Bauhaus, which celebrates its centenary this year.

Having transferred there from Weimar in 1925, the art and design school’s seven-year-stay managed to place Dessau at the heart of the Modernist movement, leaving behind it a scattering of truly ground-breaking buildings when it transferred to Berlin in 1932. Now, the city gives an impression of elegantly managed decline, with calm green streets threaded with gardens only lightly scattered with either cars or people.