4 December 1926, the Glass-Walled School Opened: 100 Years of the Bauhaus Dessau

On 4 December 1926, more than 1,000 guests poured into Dessau, a small industrial town in Germany.

Nearly 100 of them were newspaper reporters, it is said. They had come to see a school building, one whose entire side was made of glass.

The architect was Walter Gropius, and the school was the Bauhaus. This December marks exactly 100 years since the building opened.

I had only ever seen it in photographs. Putting the timeline together, I was surprised: it took just fifteen months from the start of construction to the opening.

A School Driven Out of Weimar

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919. As conflict with the conservative regional government deepened, the school had to move in 1925, and Dessau’s mayor Fritz Hesse offered it a home.

Construction began in September 1925. The topping-out ceremony was held on 21 March 1926, students moved into their studios on 1 September, and the building officially opened on 4 December.

A Wall That Carries No Weight

The building’s signature is the glass curtain wall of the workshop wing. A concrete frame carries the load, while the glass skin outside bears none. It was a declaration that walls no longer had to hold anything up.

There was a price. In summer the sun poured straight in and the workshops became ovens. The problem every glass building now deals with, they were among the first to face.

Next to it stands the white, five-storey Prellerhaus, with 28 studio flats where students and young masters lived and worked. The school left Dessau in 1932 under Nazi pressure, and the glass wall was destroyed in a 1945 air raid. It was restored in 1976, the building’s 50th anniversary, and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

[The workshop wing’s glass curtain wall, carrying no load]

Visiting Dessau Today

From September 2025 to December 2026, Dessau is celebrating the centenary under the motto To the Core. In the Bauhaus building, an exhibition dissects the structure through three materials, glass, concrete and metal, until January 2027.

The building is still in use. You can eat in the old student canteen and even spend a night in a Prellerhaus studio. It is the same room students lived in a hundred years ago.

[The student canteen, still running in the same place after 100 years]

Bauhaus Dessau

Architect: Walter Gropius
Construction: begun September 1925, opened 4 December 1926
Centenary exhibition: Glass | Concrete | Metal, 28 March 2026 – 10 January 2027, Bauhaus Building
World Heritage: UNESCO, 1996

Sources: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Bauhaus Kooperation, German History in Documents and Images, Visit Dessau, Wikipedia
Photos: 작자 미상, Public domain / GFreihalter, CC BY-SA 3.0 / Cethegus, Public domain / No machine-readable author provided, Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)