Bauhaus architecture: what the style is, how to recognise it, the school that made it, and the buildings to know from Dessau to Tel Aviv

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Bauhaus is the name of a German school of design that existed for fourteen years, from 1919 to 1933, in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, under Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe, and of the architecture that came out of it and the movement around it: buildings of flat roofs, white rendered walls, ribbon and corner windows, steel frames and glass, arranged asymmetrically by function and stripped of every ornament, which the school taught as the honest form of the machine age. The school built almost nothing itself; its architecture is the Bauhaus building in Dessau of 1926, the Masters' Houses beside it, the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart of 1927, the houses of its architects across Germany, and, after the Nazis closed it in 1933, the 4,000 white buildings of Tel Aviv and the American work of Gropius, Mies and Breuer, from which the glass office block and the modern house descend. Below: the school and its history, the ideas, the features to look for, the buildings to know, the exile, how it differs from Art Deco and from modernism in general, and the myths, with the buildings in the Buildings by style collection and the sequel in Mid-century modern architecture.

The school, 1919–1933

• Weimar, 1919–25. Walter Gropius, an architect of the Werkbund who had built the glass-walled Fagus factory in 1911, merged the Weimar art academy and school of crafts into the Staatliches Bauhaus, "house of building", in April 1919, with a manifesto whose cover was a woodcut cathedral by Feininger and the aim of uniting art, craft and industry in the building; the masters he hired were painters, Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, Schlemmer, Itten and Moholy-Nagy, who taught a preliminary course of materials and form, and workshops of weaving, metal, furniture, pottery, typography and stage; the first house, Haus am Horn of 1923, was the school's first building. The Thuringian government, turned right in 1924, cut the money and the school left.
• Dessau, 1925–32. The industrial town of Dessau, with the Junkers aircraft works, invited the school and paid for Gropius's new building and the Masters' Houses; the Bauhaus of the popular idea is these seven years, with Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel chairs, Marianne Brandt's lamps, Herbert Bayer's typography and, from 1927, an architecture department under Hannes Meyer, a Swiss Marxist who succeeded Gropius as director in 1928, built the Federal School of the trade unions at Bernau and the balcony-access houses at Dessau-Törten, and was dismissed in 1930 for his politics; Mies van der Rohe replaced him and made it an architecture school. The Nazis won Dessau in 1932 and closed it.
• Berlin, 1932–33. Mies moved it to a disused telephone factory in Berlin as a private school; the Gestapo raided it in April 1933 and the masters voted to dissolve it in July. Its 1,250 students and its teachers scattered to Britain, the United States, Switzerland, the Soviet Union and Palestine, and the word went with them.

Bauhaus.

The ideas

Gropius's manifesto said "the ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building" and that there was no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman; from 1923, under the slogan "Art and Technology: a New Unity", the school turned from craft to industry, designing prototypes for mass production, the chair, the lamp, the teapot, the house, in which the form was to come from the function and the material and nothing was to be added for decoration, which Adolf Loos had called a crime in 1908; the house was to be a machine for living, in Le Corbusier's phrase, built of standard parts, with flat roofs for terraces and because pitched roofs were "sentimental", with windows sized and placed for the light each room needed rather than for the facade, and with the plan worked out from the inside out. Colour was used, in primaries on walls and in the weaving, and the buildings were not all white; but the outside was to show the structure and the plan, and the whole was to be cheap enough for workers' housing, which was the point of the Törten estate and the Weissenhof.

How to recognise a Bauhaus building

• Flat roof, often with a terrace, and no eaves, so the wall meets the sky in a line.
• White or pale rendered walls, smooth, with no mouldings, string courses or cornices; sometimes exposed concrete or brick.
• Ribbon windows, long horizontal strips, and corner windows with no post, possible because the wall carries nothing.
• Steel or concrete frame with the wall as a skin, and a glass curtain wall where it shows the workshop or the stair, as at Dessau.
• Asymmetry: the parts arranged by use, a workshop wing, a dormitory, a bridge, a stair tower, each a different box, at Dessau in a pinwheel; no central door, no matching wings.
• Cubic volumes pushed together, cantilevered balconies, external stairs, round porthole windows, tubular steel rails.
• No ornament: the lettering on the wall, the rail, the window frames and the proportions are the decoration.
• Inside, open plans, built-in cupboards, tubular steel furniture, colour on selected walls.

What it is not: Art Deco, which is also 1920s and 30s but symmetrical, stepped, ornamented with zigzags and sunbursts, in stone and bronze, the style of the Chrysler Building; and Streamline Moderne, its curved cousin. The comparison is in Art Deco architecture.

The buildings to know

• Bauhaus Dessau (Gropius, 1925–26). The school itself: a workshop wing with a three-storey glass curtain wall hung in front of the concrete frame, a five-storey studio block for students with balconies, a bridge over the road holding the offices, and the teaching wing, joined in an asymmetric pinwheel with the name in Bayer's letters on the wall; restored in 1976 and 2006, a World Heritage Site since 1996, with rooms to sleep in the studio block.
• The Masters' Houses, Dessau (Gropius, 1926). Three pairs of semi-detached cubic houses and the director's house in a pine wood, for Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Feininger, Schlemmer and Muche, with Klee's and Kandinsky's colour schemes restored; the director's house, bombed in 1945, was rebuilt in 2014 as an abstract white shell.
• Törten Estate, Dessau (Gropius and Meyer, 1926–30). 314 terraced houses built with a crane on rails, in standard concrete parts, as the model for cheap housing, and Meyer's five balcony-access blocks.
• Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart (1927). Not Bauhaus, but its manifesto in building: 21 houses by 17 architects under Mies for the Werkbund exhibition, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, Scharoun, Behrens and Taut among them, the international style in one hillside, which the Nazis called an "Arab village" and which lost half its houses in the war.
• Barcelona Pavilion (Mies, 1929). Germany's pavilion at the Barcelona exposition, a flat roof on eight chrome columns over sliding planes of onyx, marble and glass around a pool, demolished in 1930 and rebuilt on the site in 1986; the purest statement of the free plan.
• Villa Tugendhat, Brno (Mies, 1930). A house on a slope with a living room of glass walls that sink into the floor, an onyx wall and chrome columns; a World Heritage Site.
• The White City, Tel Aviv (1930s). About 4,000 buildings by German-Jewish architects who had trained at the Bauhaus or with Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier, adapted to the sun with small windows, balconies and pilotis; the largest collection of the style anywhere, a World Heritage Site since 2003.
• In America. Gropius's own house at Lincoln, Massachusetts (1938), the Harvard Graduate Center (1950), Mies's Illinois Institute of Technology campus (1940s), the Farnsworth House (1951) and Lake Shore Drive apartments (1951), from which the Seagram Building and the glass office tower follow; Breuer's Whitney Museum (1966).

The closure and the exile

The Nazis called the school "cultural Bolshevism", its flat roofs "un-German" and its style "degenerate", and closed it in Dessau in 1932 and in Berlin in 1933; the Bauhaus of the exhibitions of "degenerate art" in 1937 was the school's teachers' painting. Gropius went to London in 1934 and to Harvard in 1937, where he ran the architecture school until 1952 and taught Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and Paul Rudolph; Mies went to Chicago in 1938 and ran the architecture school of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he built the campus; Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, which became the Institute of Design; Josef and Anni Albers went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933 and Josef to Yale; Breuer to Harvard and New York; Bayer to Aspen. In Germany the Bauhaus was rehabilitated in the West as the design of the Federal Republic, in the Ulm school of 1953 and the Braun products, and, after suspicion, in the East, where Dessau lay and where the building was restored in 1976; the Dessau school reopened as a foundation in 1994. The word "Bauhaus" became, in the United States, the name of the whole white modern style, which is not what the school taught but what its teachers built.

Versions and theories

• "Bauhaus" is a style. The school refused the word; its buildings share features because its architects shared ideas, and the name for the style was "New Building" (Neues Bauen) in Germany and "International Style" in America after the 1932 New York exhibition. Bauhaus is the school, and by extension its look.
• Every white box with strip windows is Bauhaus. Most are the international style that Le Corbusier, Oud, the Dutch and the Russians made at the same time; the Bauhaus built Dessau, Törten and Bernau, and its architects the rest.
• The Bauhaus was a school of architecture. It had no architecture department until 1927; Gropius's office, separate from the school, designed the Dessau building. It was a school of design in which architecture was the aim.
• The flat roofs leak. They did, at Dessau and Weissenhof, in the 1920s, before the membranes existed; the Nazis made much of it. Modern flat roofs are fine.
• The Bauhaus was socialist. Its second director was a Marxist and its students were often on the left, which was why Dessau's council and then the Nazis closed it; Gropius and Mies were not political, and Mies tried to work with the new regime in 1933–34 before leaving.
• Tel Aviv is a Bauhaus city. Only a handful of its architects studied at the school, and the buildings owe as much to Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier; the name stuck in the 1980s and is used with a shrug.

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