Bauhaus 100 Sites of Modernism

Extraordinary sites associated with the Bauhaus and modernism can be found throughout Germany—pioneering architecture that has enduringly shaped our understanding of life and work, learning and living. This travel guide brings the historical and architectural traces of over 100 examples of Neues Bauen building to life, making tangible the impact of the historical Bauhaus beyond the school, its sites and its time.

Along with well-known buildings, the guide features insiders’ tips throughout Germany, attractive illustrations, texts, practical information, and maps. The essays by Werner Durth and Wolfgang Pehnt outline the history of the Bauhaus’s context and its influence to the present day.

Abstract of the foreword

They say “travel teaches” but people remember the most when they are having fun, and it is in that spirit that we present here a Grand Tour of more than a hundred must-see sites of twentieth century modernism. The buildings chosen for our Grand Tour of Modernism exemplify the specific tension between modernism and Bauhaus and so inevitably one focus is on the 1920s. [...]

In the Weimar Republic in particular, cities and local authorities were an important impulse for new building projects and contributed to the spread of Neues Bauen (New Building). Large apartment buildings, open-air swimming pools, municipal halls, department stores, sports and cultural buildings, gardens and parks, factories and plants, but also schools and daycare centers, all testify to new currents in society and in architectural thinking.

The Bauhaus was part of that development. Shortly after it was founded, the first plans for a model housing development in Weimar were drawn up. Only the famous “building of the future,” the Haus Am Horn, on which all the workshops, masters, and students at the Bauhaus worked together, and which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was actually built. In Dessau, unique school and workshop buildings were built as well as the masters’ houses; then the large housing developments in Dessau-Törten by Walter Gropius and the progressive arcade buildings of Hannes Meyer, who designed ADGB Trade Union School in collaboration with the architecture department of the Bauhaus. [...]

Our Grand Tour of Modernism traces a network across the country with many hubs, not just in the big cities or places where the Bauhaus were located but also on the periphery and off the beaten track. [...]

The grand tour of the past was also an educational experience for tourists, who would visit sites of art, inspect architectural and cultural monuments, explore beautiful landscapes, and learn to understand the country and its people better. Today, the Grand Tour of Modernism hopes to enable us to look beyond our own horizons, understand the world around us, and design the future. – Wolfgang Holler, Annemarie Jaeggi, Claudia Perren