After the Bauhaus decided to relocate from Weimar to the industrial city of Dessau, the city commissioned Walter Gropius to design housing for Bauhaus masters—intended both as functional residences and as demonstrators of modern construction and living standards.
Work started in late summer 1925 on the director’s detached house plus three semi-detached duplexes, built in a pine grove near the new Bauhaus building; planning and execution were handled by Gropius’s private office (with key collaborators including Ernst Neufert and Carl Fieger).
A topping-out ceremony was held in November 1925, indicating the main structures of the Masters’ Houses had been completed—an important step toward readying the residences for occupation and for use as showcases of rational, functional building.
Lucia Moholy’s mid-1920s photographic documentation of the Dessau Bauhaus buildings—including the Masters’ Houses—helped fix the ensemble’s crisp white volumes, ribbon windows, and studio glazing in the international visual memory of modern architecture.
The Masters’ Houses were finished and ready for move-in in July 1926, completing one of the Bauhaus’s key built manifestos in Dessau—flat roofs, cubic massing, and function-led interior planning.
In summer 1926, the initial residents—Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee—moved into the houses, establishing the settlement as both a living community and a working environment with studios integrated into the homes.
Paul Klee and his family arrived in Dessau in July 1926 and lived in the Kandinsky/Klee duplex, making the Masters’ Houses a direct setting for Klee’s Bauhaus teaching years and for his domestic-studio practice.
The opening of the Bauhaus building in Dessau (December 1926) reinforced the Masters’ Houses’ role within a cohesive modernist campus—faculty housing and studios positioned close to the workshops and teaching spaces they supported.
In April 1927, the Bauhaus opened an architecture department in Dessau (led by Hannes Meyer), strengthening the institutional context in which the Masters’ Houses functioned as lived examples of a new, rational approach to building and design.
By the late 1920s, Klee’s residence in the Masters’ Houses coincided with an influential teaching phase; in 1928 he published the essay “exakte versuche im bereich der kunst” (“precise experiments in the field of art”) in the Bauhaus magazine, reflecting the school’s broader push toward systematic design thinking.
Walter Gropius resigned as Bauhaus director in April 1928 and proposed Hannes Meyer as successor; several key figures (including László Moholy-Nagy) also left, changing the social and professional dynamics around the Masters’ Houses community.
The Masters’ Houses in Dessau are included as a component of the UNESCO World Heritage property “Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau,” recognizing their significance in the development and global influence of modern architecture and design.
Dessau Masters' Houses: design, residents, and influence (1925–1930)
