Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau, and Bernau are World Heritage Sites in Germany. These sites include six locations connected to the Bauhaus art school. The sites were first named a World Heritage Site in 1996 with four locations, and two more were added in 2017.

The Bauhaus school operated from 1919 to 1933. During this time, it taught about 1,250 students, but only 155 received a Bauhaus Diploma. Despite its short history, the school changed how people thought about and created architecture and art in the 20th century.

"[The] buildings designed by Bauhaus masters are important examples of Classical Modernism. For this reason, they are important monuments not only for art and culture, but also for the ideas of the 20th century." – Application to add more sites to the UNESCO World Heritage Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar and Dessau, German delegation to UNESCO, December 2015.

Weimar

The Bauhaus was started in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius and stayed there until 1925, when it moved to Dessau because of political reasons. The school used two nearby buildings that had once been separate art schools. Both buildings were designed in the Art Nouveau style by Henry van de Velde. These buildings are:

• The 'Van de Velde' building, built between 1905 and 1906, which was originally the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, a training school for arts.
• The 'Main Building,' built between 1904 and 1911, which was originally the Großherzoglich Sächsische Hochschule für Bildende Kunst (Grand-Ducal Saxon School for Fine Arts).

The Van de Velde building has murals by Oskar Schlemmer, which were originally made for a Bauhaus exhibition in 1923. It is known for its unusual lighting in the central stairwell.

The Main Building was restored in 1999 by German architect Thomas van den Valentyn. It has a curved, oval-shaped Art Nouveau staircase. Walter Gropius’ former office has been restored with furniture, fittings, and carpets that match the original design.

After the Bauhaus in Weimar closed, the buildings were used by other art-related schools. Today, after many changes in name and structure, the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, founded in 1996, uses the old Bauhaus site to teach art, design, and technology.

The site was named a World Heritage Site in 1996. The buildings are still used for teaching, but the Bauhaus University Weimar also offers tours of the outside and inside of the site.

The Haus am Horn is a house made of concrete and steel built for the Bauhaus’ first exhibition in 1923. The design was created by Georg Muche, a painter and teacher at the school. It was the first building fully designed using Bauhaus ideas and showed a new way of living.

Following the Bauhaus belief that learning through hands-on experience is important, many staff and students helped build the house. These included Marcel Breuer, who was a student at the time, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, and László Moholy-Nagy. All the furniture, including the lighting, was made in the Bauhaus workshops.

The Haus am Horn was added to the World Heritage Site in 1996. Since August 2017, the building has been owned by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. It was closed to the public for a major restoration from 2018 to 2019 and reopened on May 18, 2019.

Dessau

The Bauhaus Dessau is one of the most famous buildings of the 20th century. It was designed by Walter Gropius and officially opened on December 4, 1926. It took just over one year to build. The building is considered a "built manifesto" of the Bauhaus's ideas, meaning its design combines practical use and beauty into one unified form.

The city of Dessau commissioned the building and paid for it. The plans were made by Gropius’s architectural firm because the Bauhaus did not have its own architecture department until 1927. However, the interior details were created in the Bauhaus workshops.

Gropius had to include two schools in the building: the Bauhaus design school and a public vocational school. The building has several wings that connect to each other and are arranged in an asymmetrical way. These wings include a three-story workshop wing, a three-story vocational school, a two-story administration wing, an auditorium, stage, and cafeteria, and a five-story studio wing. The building’s exterior uses non-load-bearing glass curtain walls, a design first developed in the Fagus Factory, built between 1911 and 1913 by Gropius and Adolf Meyer. Inside, columns and support beams are visible.

The five-story studio wing, called the "Prellerhaus," had 28 small studio flats, each 20 square meters. These flats provided housing for students and junior teachers. Bathrooms and kitchens were shared, and there was a common roof terrace. Sixteen of the flats had small balconies arranged in a regular pattern. Women lived on the first floor, known as the "ladies floor," where residents included Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Gunta Stölzl, and Anni Albers. There were 140 students total, so most lived elsewhere in Dessau. In 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, then Bauhaus director, converted some studios into classrooms. The building was restored in 2006 to return it to its original layout. Today, the studios are used as tourist accommodations.

The Bauhaus Dessau closed in 1932 due to political pressure. Mies van der Rohe later started a privately funded Bauhaus in Berlin, but it also closed after less than a year. The Dessau building was later used as a school for teaching women cooking and sewing. Before World War II began in 1939, it became a training school for Nazi Party officers. In 1941, it housed the press department of the aircraft company Junkers. During an air raid in 1945, the building was damaged. After the war, it was partially repaired but not restored properly. In 1972, the East German government listed the building as a historical monument. It was restored by Konrad Püschel, an architect who had studied at the Bauhaus. The glass curtain walls, auditorium, stage, and cafeteria were restored. On December 2, 1976, the building was reopened as a science and culture center, 50 years after its opening. Eighteen former Bauhaus students attended the event.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation was created in 1994 to study and preserve Bauhaus history. In 1996, the building was added to the World Heritage list, and major renovations were completed in 2006.

Today, the north wing, where the vocational school was, is used by the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences, whose campus is near the Bauhaus site. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation manages the rest of the building, including a museum, shop, restored cafeteria, and former student rooms rented to tourists. Other parts of the building are used for events like seminars and conventions.

The Meisterhäuser (Masters’ Houses) are seven flat-roofed, cube-shaped modern houses about 600 meters from the Bauhaus Dessau building. They were designed by Walter Gropius for senior Bauhaus staff and built between 1925 and 1926 at the request of the city of Dessau. The houses were built in a small pine forest to respect the natural landscape. Each house was large, with the director’s house measuring 350 square meters and others over 250 square meters. They had terraces and studios because teachers were expected to work from home as well as at school. In each pair of semi-detached houses, the layout was the same but rotated 90 degrees, so they did not look symmetrical from the street.

Original residents included Lyonel Feininger and László Moholy-Nagy, who lived near Gropius (though Feininger did not teach at the Dessau Bauhaus); Oskar Schlemmer and Georg Muche; Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy decorated their homes entirely with furniture designed by Marcel Breuer. Later residents included Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef and Anni Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, and Alfred and Gertrud Arndt.

After the Bauhaus closed in 1932, the houses were rented to other tenants. In 1945, the director’s house and part of the neighboring house, where Moholy-Nagy lived, were destroyed in an air raid. In 1948, a standard suburban house was built on the site of the director’s house. The other houses were occupied but altered and fell into disrepair.

The Meisterhäuser were restored in 1992 and added to the World Heritage list in 1996. The house built on the site of the director’s house was removed in 2011. In 2014, structures representing the original director’s house and Moholy-Nagy house were rebuilt on their sites to restore the ensemble’s original appearance. These structures were designed by the firm Bruno Fioretti Marquez, with interiors by artist Olaf Nicolai. The interiors now serve as exhibition spaces with historical information. The houses are managed by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. The Feininger house is the base of the Kurt Weill Centre, which promotes the work of composer Kurt Weill, who was from Dessau.

In 1932, the Trinkhalle kiosk, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was built at the corner of the director’s house site. It was part of a two-meter wall surrounding the property. The kiosk survived the war but was removed in 1962. In 2014, the wall and kiosk were rebuilt and reopened in 2016 to sell drinks and snacks to the public.

From 2016 to 2019, the Kandinsky/Klee houses were closed for a major restoration by the Wüstenrot Foundation to fully restore their interiors, especially the

Bernau

The ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau bei Berlin is a training center built between 1928 and 1930. It was designed by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer with help from Bauhaus students. The building was created for the former Federation of German Trade Unions and included rooms for classes, a dining hall, living spaces for trainees and teachers, sports areas, and a library.

This building is a perfect example of Bauhaus functionalist architecture, showing both the final design and the teamwork used to create it. It was the second largest project completed by the Bauhaus, after the Bauhaus Dessau building.

The school was designed to fit well with the natural, wooded hillside where it is located. Architectural historian Winfried Nerdinger called it a "masterpiece of poetic functionalism."

The school opened on May 4, 1930, and could hold 120 trainees.

Over time, the building had many uses, including serving as the Reich Leadership School, where members of the Gestapo and SS were trained from 1933 until the end of World War II. The complex was restored from 2005 to 2007 and is now used as an education center by the Handwerkskammer Berlin (Berlin Chamber of Skilled Crafts). In 2008, the architects Brenne Gesellschaft von Architekten won the World Monuments Fund / Knoll Modernism prize for this restoration.

The ADGB Trade Union School was added to the World Heritage Site in July 2017. The complex is not open to the public, but the Stiftung Baudenkmal Bundeschule Bernau offers guided tours of the school in German.