The Bauhaus Building, Dessau

Judged on plan, section and structure, under purpose and site. At the level of the part, necessity is high. The workshops need even, abundant light and are given a wall of glass; the classrooms need daylight on desks and are given ribbon windows; each studio needs a private outside and is given a balcony; the two schools share a road and are joined over it by the office that ran them. Take away the bridge and the building is two schools; take away the hall, the canteen and the studios and the school is a factory. What resists the test is the whole: a pinwheel is additive, its arms could be longer, fewer or turned another way, and the flat, open site compels none of its asymmetry. The glass wall exceeds its use.

Score: 8.2 / 10

What the building discloses, and can be stated: a school can be built as one working community, in which making, teaching, governing, eating, performing and sleeping each have their own form and are joined under one roof, so that the institution is legible from outside as the sum of what it does. The glass says that the workshop is the heart of the school and has nothing to hide; the bridge, that the office spans and serves both schools; the row of hall, stage and canteen, that festivity and work belong to one body; the studios over the canteen, that students live where they make. It stands at the bar, not above it: much of this was first said in the school’s programme, and the building confirms more than it uncovers.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Elevation here is clarity and lightness, a cool register. It comes at the glass corner of the workshop wing, where the wall turns with no pier and the floors seem to float inside a transparent volume, most of all when it is lit at night; at the bridge, a building carried over a road; at the stair of the workshop wing, seen through the glass; at the balconies stepping up the front of the studio block. Frequency is moderate: the vocational school wing and much of the interior are plain by intent, and many who visit find the building more modest and more domestic in scale than its photographs. There is no grandeur and no dread, and the building is not credited for a height it chose not to attempt.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The question is myth built, not evoked, and two patterns are built into the plan. The first is the community under one rule, the college or monastic order with its workshop, hall, refectory and cells, made secular here as workshops, Aula, canteen and Prellerhaus in one connected sequence. The second is the crystal: the 1919 manifesto ended on a building rising as the crystal emblem of a new faith, and the workshop wing makes it a literal volume of glass, the faith now art and industry. The particular stays particular: a provincial city’s two schools, a road, a canteen. What holds the axis lowest is depth: the myth built most fully is the machine age’s myth of transparency and production, a period’s myth rather than an archetype.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance: the German and Beaux-Arts school building, a symmetrical block on an axis with a ceremonial front, entrance hall and stair; and Gropius’s own path, the Fagus works at Alfeld, begun with Adolf Meyer in 1911, its glazed corners free of piers, and the model factory at the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. The departure: a public institution dissolved into volumes shaped by use, with no front and no axis, read only by walking round it; a curtain wall over three storeys on a building of public consequence; flat roofs and white render for a civic commission. The glass corner is Gropius’s own step from Fagus, so the swerve is in the composition more than the wall. The stake was real: a school expelled from Weimar, building on public money under attack, and closed by that politics six years later.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The form changes how its purpose is lived. The bridge puts the office between and above the two schools, and a visitor crosses the road inside the institution. Hall, stage and canteen were made to open into one another, so that the stage faced either the audience or the diners, and the school’s festivals and its stage workshop had a room built for them. The studio block puts living over eating, beside the hall and a short walk from the workshops: a student’s day is drawn in the plan. The workshops, seen from the street through glass, make work public. Substitute a symmetrical block and the community becomes a corridor of rooms. Held below the top because parts lived badly in their form: the glass made the workshops hard to heat and to cool, and the vocational school wing is a conventional classroom block in modern dress.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over promise: a century of return. Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) set the glass corner beside Picasso’s L’Arlésienne as an image of simultaneity. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”, published in 1963, took the same corner as the type of literal transparency and set it below Le Corbusier’s villa at Garches, and the building became a term in a quarrel still taught. It has been read since as photograph, through Lucia Moholy’s images; as politics, from Weimar to the closure of 1932 and the reclaiming of it in the German Democratic Republic; and as a problem of restoration. The questions stay open. Held lower because much of the return is to the school rather than the building, and the building’s thesis, once seen, is legible at a glance.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Published and visited since 1926, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the first large public building in which the new architecture was carried through a whole institutional programme, turning the school, and the civic building, from a symmetrical block into a composition of volumes shaped by use and joined by circulation, with the curtain wall at public scale. It sums steps taken at Fagus and elsewhere as much as it strikes first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the emblem of the modern movement within a few years, shown in the International Style exhibition of 1932; and after 1945 the asymmetric school, college and civic complex of separate wings, glass for work and walls for rooms, a common model in Europe and beyond. Discounted because the school’s teaching and émigrés carried much of what is called its influence.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the plan, the volumes, the bridge, the row of hall, stage and canteen and the studio block are the maker’s and legible, and the building has outlived its conditions as a model answered for a century. But its defining element, the glass wall of the workshop wing, was destroyed in 1945 and stands as a reconstruction, restored again since, and form carried by fabric is charged with it. Use: the school it was built for used it six years; it passed to other uses through the Nazi years and the war, and only since the 1970s and 1990s has it returned to teaching, design and exhibition, a use akin to its own, not its own. Fabric: bomb damage, provisional repair, the rebuilding of 1976 and the later restoration replaced much of what is seen.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command of massing is high and load-bearing: volumes of different heights and densities composed so that each use is legible and the whole balanced without symmetry; the slab cantilevered past the columns, which frees the glass wall from the frame and lets it turn the corner; the proportion of glass, render and ribbon window across five uses; the workshops’ lighting, furniture, lettering and colour made one thing with the building. The costs are the making’s: single glazing in steel frames that could neither hold heat nor exclude it, condensation and corrosion, flat roofs that needed early repair, a building made fast and cheaply on a municipal budget. The frame is ordinary engineering, competently used. The idea of the building is commanded more fully than its envelope.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the workshop wing, an almost wholly glass volume of collective production, and the studio block, a cellular tower of private rooms, each with its own balcony. One is transparency and labour, the other enclosure and sleep. They obey one law: each volume takes its form, height and glazing from its use, inside one vocabulary of rendered skeleton, flat roof, dark steel window and white wall, joined by circulation rather than by a front. The vocational school, the bridge, the hall and the canteen obey it, and so do the interiors, where lamps, chairs, lettering and colour are made under the building’s rule. The range runs from factory to dwelling, so the coherence is not narrow. Held lower because the law is a method rather than a proportion: it explains each part, but binds the parts to one another less closely.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Orders held in one structure: work and industry, in the workshops; education at two levels, the art school and the city’s trade school; the governing institution, in the bridge; the community at table and at festival, in the canteen and the hall; dwelling, in the studio block; the city, which commissioned the building, runs its road through it and placed its own school in it; and art, built into the fabric by the workshops. One plan places each and joins them by bridge and corridor, so they are integrated. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the sacred, death, history, deliberately set aside, and the natural order beyond light, air and flat ground. More orders than a house holds, fewer than a cathedral or a city; the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10