In 1925, the design school was forced out of Weimar. The city is ready to welcome it back The birthplace of the Bauhaus is not very Bauhaus. The legendary school, which revolutionized design and has been synonymous for decades with the concept of modernism, left surprisingly few marks on the place where it was founded 100 years ago, a small city near the center of Germany called Weimar. Only one of those marks was architectural: a square white house called the Haus am Horn. With hard right angles and flat rooflines, it has the aesthetic touchstones of modernity and rationality that have come to be seen?in designs ranging from household appliances to skyscrapers?as the Bauhaus style.
In 1925, the Bauhaus was forced to leave Weimar and move to its second and more famous home in Dessau, 80 miles to the north. There, the purpose-built Bauhaus campus, designed by the school?s founding director, Walter Gropius, is something of a pilgrimage site for Bauhaus aficionados and architecture enthusiasts. Even in Berlin, where the school operated under the leadership of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for less than a year before being shut down by the Nazis, buildings like the Bauhaus Archive are veritable landmarks of its impact. Weimar, perhaps better known as the city where the newly written German constitution created the so-called Weimar Republic after World War I, is comparably lacking in Bauhaus flair. But Weimar may actually be the better place to fully understand the B...