When architectWalter Gropius founded theBauhaus school in 1919, his utopian manifesto proclaimed that minimalism and a fusion of fine arts and craft would “one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come.” Only 700 students attended the Bauhaus during its short, 14-year lifetime, but the school’s design philosophy eventually reached millions. Bauhaus teachers and students scattered worldwide when the Nazis closed the school in 1933, planting their alma mater’s streamlined and modern seeds far and wide.
April 1st marks the school’s centenary, and while the Bauhaus mantra was “less is more,” there are abundant destinations where visitors can see the eccentric academy’s design influence. Below, we highlight eight visitor-friendly spots that tell the Bauhaus story, from a glass-encased shoe last factory to geometric private homes.
Fagus Factory
Alfeld-Hannover, Germany
Fagus Factory, Alfeld on the Leine, Lower Saxony, Germany. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Back when the thought of founding the Bauhaus was just a glimmer in Gropius’s eye, he designed the Fagus Factory (1911), a shoe last factory in Germany that foreshadowed the concepts he would later bring to the avant-garde academy. The nature of the project—an architectural space for craftsmen—echoed the Bauhaus’s marriage of art and craft. Gropius designed the Fagus Factory as a space that maximized sunlight and fresh air for the workers, in order to improve productivity.
Gropius lined the exterior with revolutionary curtain walls of glass. It was a feat of both design and engineering: To replace conventional load-bearing exterior walls with thin window sheets, Gropius placed reinforced concrete columns inside the buildings. The factory’s 10 structures have been listed as a historic monument since 1946 (unusual for industrial buildings), and are still operating.
Bauhaus Museum Weimar
Weimar, Germany

In his founding manifesto, Gropius proclaimed: “Let us strive for, conceive, and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting.” And so, he invited a host of artists from a smorgasbord of disciplines to join his project as teachers, among them Lyonel Feininger ,Wassily Kandinsky,Paul Klee,Oskar Schlemmer , andLászló Moholy-Nagy. Their creations now fill the Bauhaus Museum Weimar, which boasts the oldest museum collection of Bauhaus workshop works.
Weimar’s Bauhaus Museum wasn’t designed by Bauhäuslers, but the nearby Haus am Horn (1923) on the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar campus is an early example of the school’s architecture. Planned by
Zentrum Paul Klee
Bern, Switzerland
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland. Photo by LulaMae’s via Wikimedia Commons.
As a teacher, Klee’s approach was theoretical—like Gropius, he believed that art was intuitive and couldn’t actually be taught. But nonetheless, he led a range of workshops at the Bauhaus: bookbinding, glass painting, weaving, and painting. Klee’s time at the Bauhaus was productive for his own work, too. While there, he wrote around 3,900 pages of teaching notes that he eventually compiled as Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925). Klee’s notes, archive, and an extensive collection of 4,000 artworks are kept at the artist’s museum in his native Switzerland, Zentrum Paul Klee, which was founded by the painter’s grandson and designed by acclaimed architect
.
Bauhaus Dessau
Dessau, Germany
Bauhaus Building, Walter Gropius, 1925–26, Dessau. Photo © Tadashi Okochi. Courtesy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
The school’s students and youngest teachers were entrenched in Bauhaus ideology day and night, by virtue of their residence at the Prellerhaus, a Gropius-designed campus wing that combined studios and housing (and was among the first student dormitories in Germany). The five-story building had 28 modestly sized studios inhabited by creatives such
Master Houses of Kandinsky and Klee
Dessau, Germany
Bauhaus Building, Walter Gropius, 1926, Dessau. Courtesy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
Villa Tugendhat
Brno, Czech Republic
Villa Tugendhat, Brno, Czech Republic. Photo by David Židlický. Courtesy of Villa Tugendhat.
Architect
was the third and final director of the Bauhaus, between 1930 and 1933, and, like Gropius, he emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. But before moving to Chicago, where he taught architecture and designed skyscrapers, he completed a residential project in the Czech town of Brno that showcased his use of technology in the service of improved modern living, called Villa Tugendhat (1929–30).
Gropius House
Lincoln, Massachusetts
Gropius House, Walter Gropius, Lincoln, MA. Courtesy of Historic New England.
Poli House
Tel Aviv, Israel
Poli House, Shlomo Liaskowski, Tel Aviv, Israel. Courtesy of the Poli House.
One such building was the triangular-shaped Polishuk House, built in 1934 at a six-point intersection in the city center. Originally an office building planned by Shlomo Liaskowski—an architect trained in the Bauhaus-inspired
in Brussels and Paris—the white plastered structure solved the design dilemma of an unusual footprint with Bauhausian finesse. Because Polishuk House faced two streets, a single façade was forgone in favor of dynamic horizontal ribbon windows that point the building in all directions (making it also resemble a ship, befitting its Mediterranean seaside location). The building changed hands and was a printing press and a shoe store, before a recent meticulous, multi-year restoration process prepared it for its current iteration as a boutique hotel, Poli House.
Karen Chernick
https://www.artsy.net/