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The visitor information center for the Törten Estate is located in another experimental Bauhaus project, the Steel House. This unusual structure was a collaboration between architect Richard Paulick and Georg Muche, who is now remembered as a painter but was deeply involved in design and architecture experiments at the Bauhaus. After World War I, a few German designers thought that prefabricated steel houses could help address the national housing shortage, but demand for the structures never materialized. This prototype contains more than 900 square feet of living space with three small bedrooms.

Gropius also designed the Konsum, or Co-op Building, the visual centerpiece of the Törten Estate. The structure conjoins a low horizontal box that accommodated a café, grocer and butcher with a rectilinear column containing rental apartments. A nearby electrical tower prominently advertised one of the estate’s modern amenities.

After Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928, the Bauhaus Building Department, under Hannes Meyer, who succeeded Gropius as director, developed another approach to low-income housing. Named for its groundbreaking design innovation — Housing with Balcony Access — the group of five red brick apartment buildings, with a large common garden in the rear, is located south of the Törten estate. Entry to the buildings’ rental apartments was via external staircases and balconies. The stairwells have since been enclosed with glass.

During the Törten project, Carl Fieger assisted Gropius as a technical drawing engineer while an associate at Gropius’s architecture firm. He began designing single-family homes in 1927 while teaching in the Building Department at the Bauhaus. The Fieger House, his personal home adjacent to the Steel House, was the only one of his residential designs ever built. It demonstrates a lively combination of forms, grafting a half-round column — the house’s stairwell — onto the cubes of the inhabited rooms. The house remains in private hands.

Fieger’s public Dessau landmark is the Kornhaus, a restaurant on the banks of the Elbe River, about a 20-minute walk north of the Bauhaus campus. Built in 1929–30, the Kornhaus features a glassed-in, semi-circular verandah as the restaurant’s main dining room. Renovations in 1996 retained most of the original character of the building, which is still a popular dining spot.

The building that best exemplifies the credo that form follows function was the Employment Office (1928–29). With the introduction of social insurance in Germany in 1927, job matching and state financial support were combined into a single agency, and architects across the country sought to create new buildings for the tasks. Gropius designed the low-rise structure with a rectangular wing for offices and a semi-circular wing, clad in yellow brick, for public use. Five entrances segregated by gender and job category led into waiting rooms, then past potential employers — always flowing toward the center. If no job offer was made, the applicant received cash at a central payment desk. The exterior of the building has been modified, most notably with the addition of traditional casement windows. The interior has been reconfigured to serve as the city’s traffic department.

German reunification has brought Dessau the promise of economic rejuvenation — an optimism most evident in the first landmark building to be constructed since the end of the Bauhaus era. In 2005, the Federal Environmental Agency relocated its chief operations to a stunning postmodern complex, designed by the firm of Sauerbruch Hutton of Berlin, that was constructed on a remediated brownfield near the central train station. Its undulating ribbon of offices faced with glass and wood is a model of sustainable design, with high-efficiency insulation and on-site energy generation through geothermal heat exchange, photovoltaic arrays and, in a nod to the site’s industrial past, an electrical generator fired by landfill gas. The structure’s center features park-like landscaping beneath a high roof of folded glass panels. Although the style of the building is far more eclectic than any Bauhaus architect would have contemplated, its form nevertheless supports its function — manifesting a social contract between government and populace.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Patricia Harris and David Lyon write extensively on art, design, travel and food.
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