The building Walter Gropius designed for the Bauhaus school in 1925–26 is the founding monument of modernist architecture. Its glass curtain wall, flat roof, and interlocking wing structure — workshop block, studio wing, bridge connection — were all radical departures when they went up, and the ensemble still reads as deliberate and coherent today. It is one of those buildings where the photograph doesn't prepare you for the real thing.
The building is still in use as a design school, which means it lives rather than just being preserved. You can visit the permanent exhibition tracing the history of the Bauhaus movement, tour the workshops, and — if you book well ahead — sleep in one of the student studio rooms in the Prellerhaus wing, fitted out with Bauhaus-designed furniture.
story: > Gropius designed the Bauhaus Building in just months after the school's politically charged expulsion from Weimar. The workshop wing's glass facade — an unbroken wall of glazing wrapping around the corner — was structurally possible only because the floors were cantilevered inward, freeing the outer skin from any load-bearing role. It was a demonstration of principle as much as architecture: the building was itself a Bauhaus manifesto.