Dessau, as the Bauhaus turns 100

At five on a December afternoon in Dessau it’s already dark, and the glass wall of the Bauhaus workshop wing lights up like a lantern. It has done so since 4 December 1926, when Walter Gropius’s school opened its new building in this small town on the Elbe. Inside, students learned to make chairs, lamps, wallpaper and typefaces fit for industry. Much of what you have at home, from the tubular-steel chair to the plain white kitchen, can be traced back to the workshops behind that glass.

The building turns 100 this year, and the town is marking it. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has run a centenary programme called “To the Core” since September 2025, and it ends with a birthday weekend on 4 and 5 December. Lonely Planet named Dessau in its Best in Travel 2027 list, the only German entry among its 25 destinations, and Il Sole 24 Ore’s write-up of the pick explains why: few places let you walk through the moment modern design began.

The birthday weekend

On Friday 4 December the Bauhaus building itself hosts the party, “A Building Enters the Stage”, with performances and activities in and around the workshops. On Saturday the action moves to the Bauhaus Museum for a public forum with the Federal Agency for Civic Education (English contributions are interpreted into German). It ends with the opening of a new exhibition, Exhausted Narratives, which runs until 29 March. Both days are free. The anniversary book goes on sale on the 4th. The full timetable hasn’t been published yet, so check the foundation’s page in the week before.

Most of the centenary exhibitions are still open. Glass | Concrete | Metal, in the historic workshop wing, looks at what the building is made of and runs until October 2027. At the museum, Bakelite | Glaze | Colour runs until 31 January and Gong | Bang | Whistle until 29 March. One correction to earlier reviews: Algae | Debris | CO2 in the former Zeeck department store closed on 11 October. Visit Dessau’s guide to the anniversary and its report from the opening of the exhibitions show what remains.

The all-in-one ticket, €29, covers the building, the Masters’ Houses and the museum for three consecutive days, which is enough for a long weekend. From November to February all three are open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm and closed on Mondays. Public tours in winter are in German only: the building at 11am, the Masters’ Houses at 12.30pm.

The Masters’ Houses and the estate in Törten

Ten minutes’ walk from the school, in a pine grove on Ebertallee, stand the white houses Gropius built for himself and his teachers. Kandinsky and Klee shared one, Feininger and Moholy-Nagy lived next door, and Schlemmer and Muche had the third pair. The director’s house and Moholy-Nagy’s half were destroyed in 1945, and the plain new volumes that replaced them in 2014 echo the originals without copying them.

For a sense of what the Bauhaus meant for ordinary people, take tram 1 south towards Dessau Süd to the Törten estate. Between 1926 and 1928 Gropius built 314 terraced houses here, each with a garden big enough to grow food, using methods borrowed from the factory floor. A century of owners has changed windows and added extensions, and spotting the original details is part of the fun of the walk. In winter you explore on your own: the Konsum building with its exhibition and the daily tour return in March. The Steel House, made of three-millimetre steel plates in 1927, has an open-air display outside until the end of February.

Dinner by the Elbe

The Kornhaus is a twenty-minute walk north of the Masters’ Houses, on the river. Carl Fieger, who worked in Gropius’s office, designed it around 1930 as a restaurant and dance hall with a curved glass front facing the water, and it was restored to that look in 2012. In winter it serves lunch and dinner from Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 9pm. Book a table by the window.

For breakfast, go down to the Café-Bistro in the Bauhaus cellar, open from 8am, where the centenary breakfast costs €17.90. The museum café, LOKAL/LOKAL, does soups and cakes from regional producers. Ignore any guide that sends you to the old Bauhaus canteen, Knolle und Kelle, which is temporarily closed.

Advent in the Garden Realm

From 23 November to 23 December the Dessau Advent market fills the Marktplatz, with an ice rink, a Ferris wheel and more than 50 stalls. It’s open until 8pm on weekdays and 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays, so it fits neatly after the museums close.

Dessau also sits in the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, a UNESCO-listed landscape of parks laid out in the late 18th century by Prince Leopold III. Wörlitz Park, one of the first English landscape gardens on the continent, is free and open all year, but its palaces are closed from November. That makes it a winter walk rather than a house visit: mist on the lakes, bare trees, almost nobody about. On Saturday 28 November, the first Advent weekend, the WelterbeLinie 304 bus runs free between Dessau, Wörlitz and Wittenberg for the Wörlitz Christmas market, with music and storytelling on board. Closer to town, the Georgium park is a ten-minute walk from the Masters’ Houses.

Two films to watch before you go: DW’s short introduction, and an architecture writer’s walk around the centenary this spring.

8:31

14:13

A bed in the student studios

The best stay in Dessau is inside the school. The Prellerhaus, the five-storey studio block with the little balconies, has 28 rooms where Bauhaus students once lived, and you can book one for the night from €60. Bathrooms are shared on each floor, as they were in the 1920s, and there’s no breakfast and no lift. There’s a catch, though: the studio building closes from 6 December until 21 February, so the birthday weekend gives you the last nights of the year. Booking is by request form or email, not instantly.

After that, Hotel 7 Säulen is a small, family-run hotel on Ebertallee, right opposite the Masters’ Houses, with a breakfast room facing them. For something quieter, the Elbpavillon is an 18th-century dike-watch tower by the Georgium, rented out as a holiday home for two to four, with a fireplace and deliberately no TV. There’s a two-night minimum. If you’d rather be near the Christmas market, B&B Hotel Dessau on Schloßplatz is the budget option in the centre.

Quick logistics

Regional trains run direct to Dessau Hauptbahnhof from Berlin in about an hour and a half and from Leipzig in under an hour, and the Deutschlandticket covers them, along with the town’s trams and buses. The Bauhaus building is ten minutes’ walk from the west exit of the station. Expect around 5°C by day and sunset at about 4pm. Bauhaus sites are closed from 24 to 26 December and on 31 December and 1 January.

Under six weeks until the building turns 100, and only 28 studio rooms to sleep in that weekend. The Prellerhaus booking page, the all-in-one ticket, a window table at the Kornhaus, the Törten walk and the free Advent bus to Wörlitz are all in our Dessau collection. Save it, send the studio request today, and on the night of the 4th, watch the glass wall light up from the street.

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