Dessau 1989/90

Cigarette break

A seating group consisting of GDR-adaptations of the S32 cantilever chair by Marcel Breuer, in the staircase of the northern wing, affords a view of the bridge on the first floor of the Bauhaus building by Walter Gropius. At the centre of the scene, we see an orb-shaped ash-tray, a model one could find in many public buildings in the GDR. Pictures hang between the director’s office and the secretarial department. What kind of everyday institutional life is captured in this image? The “Centre for Design Bauhaus Dessau”, a facility that had been run by the GDR’s Ministry of Building and its Ministry of Culture since 1986, was in a period of transition, not just in terms of its responsible bodies.

The building accommodated workshops and conferences that critically engage with GDR housing and urban-planning policy, as well as the industrially dominated landscapes in the region. In November 1989, in the turbulent days of the peaceful revolution, the international Walter Gropius Seminar had brought together experts from the East and West at the Bauhaus building. In its workshop spaces, they designed, presented and discussed, spending their breaks smoking in the staircase.

The temporary gallery on the bridge refers to cultural activities by the “Design Centre”. Already in 1976, it had presented exhibitions on the history of the Bauhaus, supplemented by contemporary positions and multimedia stage experiments criticising the system, thereby frequently triggering the State Security (Stasi) into action. To protect the heritage that had by then also been recognised by the GDR, a hybrid institution was able to evolve, which was neither a museum nor an architecture and design school, although this is precisely where its quality lay. In 1989/90, the different interest groups, planners, art historians, producing artists, designers and architects no doubt argued during their cigarette breaks on how to pick up on the legacy of the Bauhaus during this especially historic period.

Backstage

The staircase tower of the workshop wing, with its canopy over the side entrance, is one of the most-photographed perspectives on the Bauhaus building. The images rarely focused on the rather unsatisfactory architectural solution to the situation, instead highlighting the vertically descending Bauhaus-lettering designed by Herbert Bayer. In this Universal font – a related form of Grotesk, in capitals – Bayer broke with the standard Bauhaus practice of only using the lower case. The letters are fixed on thin wire rods, making them appear to hover in front of the wall.

Often, photographs documenting this lettering were taken in the afternoon sunshine, to capture the projections on the wall. As early as in 1933, when the building was taken over as a training facility by the Nazi-party, the lettering was removed and has since been considered lost. When the Bauhaus building was reconstructed in 1976, the building’s key feature was also restored. By 1964, the GDR had included the Bauhaus building in its list of heritage monuments. A building documentation already initiated by the College of Architecture and Building (Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen) in Weimar was to form the basis of the building’s reconstruction.

On December 4, 1976, on the Bauhaus building’s 50th anniversary, the facility was reopened as a research and cultural centre, after a rocky road to gradual recognition, as well as the Bauhaus heritage’s official state commissioning by the GDR. The 1976 reconstruction focused on recreating the image that the architect himself had had documented in the 1920s, using the mass-media of photography – while ignoring the photographer Lucia Moholy herself, who had been responsible for the photographs. Later, this process was also criticised by monument preservation authorities, since it was, “aimed at removing all the significant changes that history had applied to the building.”1

The restoration of the exterior appearance also included the lettering. The fact that it was produced by metalworkers from the Vockerode lignite power plant in their spare time, is one of many anecdotes that reflect the difficult circumstances of the Bauhaus building’s 1976 reconstruction.2 In fact, it represented the first comprehensive renovation that had ever been carried out on a modernist building. After all, appreciation of these more recent monuments only emerged in the field of heritage preservation in the 1970s. Over ten years later, the building presented itself from the perspective of the everyday life in use. The lettering hovered over transport routes and delivery areas that can be found at the rear entrances of many public facilities 

Suburban?

The street view of the Kleinring in the neighbourhood designed by Walter Gropius in Dessau Törten follows a gently curved route and is remotely reminiscent of a “drive” – an inner access road – as is prevalent in American suburbs. Although the buildings now differ strongly in terms of their plaster and façade design, the street space is able to communicate some of the second construction stage, which began in 1927, with a modified floor plan following public criticism of the first housing type, both with respect to the spatial brief and the plots’ delineation. Walter Gropius afforded rhythm to the street space with the sequence of projecting and recessed buildings, while at the same time grouping the houses together internally by using reflecting pairs.

The functional domestic processes were to be legible in the façade structure. Törten was an experimental neighbourhood, in more ways than one. For instance, the urban-planning instrument, with its spider’s-web arrangement is influenced by the design principles of the garden city, without avowing to the latter’s idyllic appearance. This can also be seen in the names of the streets: Doppelreihe (double row), Kleinring (small ring), Mittelring (centre ring). Ultimately, the plan of the construction site facilities, with railway tracks, gravel pits and production areas for the cement blocks, served as a blueprint for the development plan.3 As a miniature “housing-construction factory”, Dessau Törten formed part of the policy to encourage home ownership, which the Reich Housing Law had been supporting in the Weimar Republic since 1920. At the same time, the neighbourhood was an area of experimentation to rationalise and typify housing construction, a move supported by the Reich Research Organisation for Economic Viability in the field of building and housing. The entire construction process and the materials used to construct the neighbourhood were subject to strict monitoring.

Having such a high public profile, the many published photos of Dessau-Törten were aimed at communicating the connection between the individual buildings and terraced housing on the one hand and a uniformly ordered overall development on the other, while quasi artfully expressing the logic of rationalisation. Despite decades of rotating the entire spatial organisation of the neighbourhood’s buildings and their façades, the urban-planning figure has proven to be extraordinarily robust. However, new structuring proposals should be noted: for instance, internal agreements were reached concerning the planted vegetation and façade designs of the inner areas around the semi-detached houses. And the tavern “Gaststätte Ring” reflects how, compared to the former centre of the neighbourhood in the Konsum building, the opportunities to buy goods and meet people had diversified – as a precursor of post-socialist entrepreneurship, for which one’s own house served as collateral to found a business.

Under power

Even shortly after their completion in 1927, the Type SieTö II neighbourhood homes along Damaschkestrasse already started to fall out of line. Decades of change, resulting from the use requirements and comfort demands of their residents, have left their traces on the buildings. In doing so, the load-bearing structure and the floor plan have proven to be surprisingly flexible.

In 1989/90, a special moment of conversion activity was captured, before all the DIY stores had opened, with their abundance of front doors, insulating material, windows, fences and small sculptures. The buildings had individualised, looked after themselves and were repaired with what was available. The front gardens also refuse to be collectively organised, while respecting the contact zones between the footpaths and the fence.

The building measures behind the façades, inside the buildings, were mainly determined by a desire for more usable space, which expanded into the gardens.4 Damaschkestrasse formed the first of the neighbourhood’s concentrically arranged rings, at the centre of which stands a power pylon, forming a symbol of the garden city’s integration into the infrastructure networks of central Germany’s industrial region; its seemingly clean electricity was hardly regarded in the context of the region’s ravaged landscape.

The forest of antennae on the flat roofs of the houses opposite not only provided access to the medium of television, inspiring a chain of associations concerning the time of these photographs. Did not the evenings watching western television in the neighbourhood’s living rooms also play a part in the gradual erosion of the Iron Curtain? The antennae symbolize the expanded spatial relationships in which the neighbourhood is integrated. They seem to assume the position of the power pylon, while also commenting on the photographs anchored in collective memory that conveyed the modernity of Dessau-Törten for decades. Thus, the pink supports of the pylon in the Damaschkestrasse of 1989/90 now have only a peripheral role as precursors of a new age.

Out of the semi-shade

The entrance drive to the first semi-detached house of the master houses by Walter Gropius in Ebertallee seem almost overgrown. The lush vegetation has encroached up to the house’s outer walls, while the pine forest has long been diversified with other shrubs and bushes. The small window aperture in the visible façade had probably been inserted in 1950, when the building was converted into an outpatient clinic. Before that, the general practitioner who had worked there had still kept the large-scale studio glazing. Feininger House had been spared any bombing damage in 1945, unlike the neighbouring house and the director’s buildings, which were both destroyed. The partially preserved cellar was filled in. The entrance drives are equivalent to those used for a publicly accessible building. No forest footpaths or trails, and instead an asphalt drive and hedges planted to outline the individual property areas. While the other semi-detached houses’ outdoor uses are arbitrary – as a parking space, an area for dustbins or as a bike-stand – a certain order still survives on this property. Is it the result of efforts to elevate the building’s status to a fully detached house?

In fact, the two semi-detached halves were so tightly interwoven on all floors that an additional wall was built in 1950 to conclude the building towards its neighbouring house. Is it due to the phantom situation that Haus Feininger was the first building to be refurbished and renovated, and the fact that especially here, the idea of reconstruction was conceived, to reassume the visual appearance of the building as exactly as possible? Among other consequences, that meant removing traces of time that revealed wear, decay and conversion, but did not conform to visual authenticity, during the process of renovation. Already in 1993, when restoration work on Feininger House began, its reconstruction was primarily dedicated to the artistic thoughts of its designer and photographic documentation.5 

Modern palimpsest

Plaster crumbles from the grey façades. Humidity has damaged the foundations. Chimneys, windows and front doors reflect structural changes depending on their respective use. In 1989/90, the Dessau master houses were almost unique as an iconic ensemble, an impressive document of the controversies of appreciation of classic modern architecture. They were captured in a state of decay, no doubt such an unsettling sight because it contradicts the symbolic value of timelessness. After all, these buildings are not supposed to age: their radiant white volumes and smooth façades, widely reported on in the media, have contributed to a notion that traces of time are ugly, dirty and signs of decline.

At the time of these photographs, the buildings in Ebertallee had been constructed when it had been known as Burgkühnauer Allee, which was renamed in 1930 as Stresemannallee. From 1933, it became known as Hindenburgallee, thereby reflecting the ruling political positions in the changed street names. Soon after the Bauhaus protagonists were forced to leave the master houses, the Junkers aviation and engine factory took over the buildings, a corporation that was key to arming the air force of the German Wehrmacht. Structural changes, both with respect to the spatial organisation and to the arrangement of the windows, immediately followed. By the late 1930s, the Junkers factory had also purchased the director’s house and the semi-detached buildings by Walter Gropius from the city of Dessau, to use them as housing for their employees.

The purchase was on the proviso of “removing the unnatural building style from the cityscape”. Studio glazing and the window bands of the staircases were replaced by small wooden windows. After 1945, the semi-detached buildings that had survived the war were used as housing, which was then owned by the city.6 The coarse cement plaster reflected the reservoir of building materials used in the GDR’s construction industry. In 1970, the master houses were also preservation-listed, at a time when international heritage preservation first began engaging with this young monument type.

The buildings’ discrediting during the Nazi period and the years after the war also shaped stances on making amends with respect to their structural heritage, all the more affecting the mood in Dessau after 1989. These photographs document the buildings as housing, ageing and exposed to the rigours of the weather and everyday use. They recount these modern icons not from the perspective of a history of decay and loss, but appeal for a monument narrative that is less interested in the static artefact of the final building and the intentions of the architect, and instead regards architecture as a material process of continuous updating and change.

Joachim Brohm visited Dessau immediately after the political change in 1989/90. Out of personal interest, he took a day to photograph the architectural witnesses of the Bauhaus period. A few years ago, the photographic material was re-sifted, c-prints were made and shown in Brohm's exhibition ‘Dessau Files‘ at the Beck and Eggeling International Fine Art Gallery in Vienna, on the occasion of the ‘Foto Wien‘ festival. Daidalos would like to thank you for allowing the pictures to be shown here.

All pictures: © Joachim Brohm/VG Bild-Kunst/Pro Litteris 2025.