Bauhaus in Germany: 15 Sites in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar

The Bauhaus school existed in three German cities in turn, and all three still hold buildings you can walk into: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, and Berlin for ten months in 1932 and 1933 before the Nazi regime shut it down. Fifteen sites across those three cities are open to visitors, several of them on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the whole set fits into four days with two train journeys. Dessau holds the largest collection of original Bauhaus buildings anywhere. Weimar holds the oldest collection of Bauhaus objects, assembled by Walter Gropius himself. Berlin holds the archive, the housing estates and the ending.

This page covers those three cities, and it is the densest architecture route in Germany. I travelled it in that order and paid attention to what was actually open, what it cost and how long each stop took. I was invited to visit the Bauhaus sites in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar by the German National Tourist Office and the cities of Berlin and Dessau, and as always I was free to describe what I found.

Where the Bauhaus school was, and in what order

The Bauhaus school moved twice in fourteen years and was closed by force at the end, which is why its sites are spread across three states rather than gathered in one city. Walter Gropius founded it in Weimar in 1919 out of the existing school of applied arts, and in those first years it taught no architecture at all: students were taught to look at materials and form from scratch, and only later to design for manufacture. Entry needed talent rather than qualifications, and Gropius’s stated aim was to break the wall between fine art and applied art.

Political pressure in Thuringia pushed the school out in 1925. Dessau is where it found its stride, put up its own building, started teaching architecture and produced the objects and buildings most people picture when they hear the word. In 1932 it moved again, to a disused telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz under its third director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was attacked by the Nazis for what they called degenerate communist ideas, and closed in 1933 after ten months. The teachers and students then scattered across the world, which is the reason a school that lasted fourteen years shaped buildings on every continent.

If you want the movement’s roots rather than the school, that trip is in the west of the country: see our guide to Bauhaus in NRW, which covers Krefeld, Essen and Hagen, where the thinking behind the Bauhaus was worked out before 1919 and where Mies and Gropius’s patrons lived. This page stays in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar.

Bauhaus in Berlin

Berlin holds four of the fifteen sites, and the city’s Bauhaus traces are scattered rather than clustered. Keep your eyes up and you will spot the style in flat roofs, cubic blocks, unornamented facades, multi-storey car parks and whole housing estates. Historically Berlin is the third Bauhaus city and the one where the school ended.

1. The temporary bauhaus-archiv

The Bauhaus-Archiv’s collection is not where most guides still put it. The Gropius-designed museum on Klingelhöferstraße in the Tiergarten has been closed since 2018 for a full restoration under its listed-building protection, with a new museum annexe by Staab Architekten going up alongside it, and it is expected back around the end of 2027. The archive and library stay closed through the works.

What is open is the temporary bauhaus-archiv at Knesebeckstraße 1 in Charlottenburg, a couple of minutes from Ernst-Reuter-Platz U-Bahn station. It runs smaller exhibitions plus talks, film screenings and debates, shares the building with the Bauhaus-Archiv shop, and opens Monday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm. Admission is free. Groups need to register in advance. On my visit the displays covered a Bauhaus timeline and the women of the movement, which is the kind of subject a small space does well.

2. Berlinische Galerie

The Berlinische Galerie is Berlin’s museum of modern art, photography and architecture, at Alte Jakobstraße 124-128 in Kreuzberg, and it holds the city’s own art and architecture from 1880 onwards, including the New Objectivity years that ran alongside the Bauhaus. It opens Wednesday to Monday from 10am to 6pm and closes on Tuesdays. Admission is €12 ($14, £10), or €7 ($8, £6) reduced, with under-18s free, and on the first Wednesday of every month everyone pays the reduced €7.

Set expectations before you go. This was the venue for the Bauhaus-Archiv’s big loan exhibition of over 1,000 objects, which organised the movement by year rather than chronologically by theme, and the piece I still remember from it is Marianne Brandt’s geometric tea infuser, practical and severe at the same time. That show has long since come down and the objects went back to the archive, so come for the permanent Berlin collection and treat any Bauhaus content as a bonus.

If you are in Berlin for several days and plan on other museums, the Berlin WelcomeCard covers public transport and discounts at a long list of attractions, and a timed entry ticket for the Berlinische Galerie can be bought in advance. Find more details and buy your card here.

3. Siemensstadt, the Ringsiedlung

Siemensstadt is a modernist housing estate straddling Berlin’s Charlottenburg-Nord and Spandau districts, and it is one of the six Berlin Modernism Housing Estates inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is free, outdoors and open at any hour, because people live in it.

The brief was cheap housing for workers at the nearby Siemens plant, and six architects built 1,379 flats to it at the turn of the 1930s. Hans Scharoun drew the master plan and Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus school’s first director, was among the six. The priorities were function and social practicality, in that order, and the buildings look plain at first glance. The point is the comparison: walk them next to the later blocks around them and the difference in intent is obvious.

A good route runs from Siemensdamm U-Bahn station along Mäckeritzstraße into Goebelstraße, part way up and down Jungfernheideweg, then back along Goebelstraße to the junction with Heilmannring, where there is a small information centre. It was shut when I passed it. Blue panels along the way name the buildings and their architects, which does most of the work.

4. Haus Nürnberg, the Femina Palace

Haus Nürnberg at Nürnberger Straße 50-55 was built between 1928 and 1931 by Erich Mendelsohn as an entertainment venue, and it belongs to Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, the sober functional substyle that ran alongside the Bauhaus. The building is listed and the facade is the reason to walk past it.

Do not plan a stay or a meal here. The Ellington Hotel, which occupied the building and kept much of the 1920s and 1930s detail in its entrance rooms, staircases and hall after a 2007 remodelling, ceased trading on 30 September 2021 when the owner sold the property and the operating lease ended. Its Duke restaurant went with it. The building later passed through the Signa insolvency and was bought by the investor Vivion, which has said it intends a five-star hotel, but conversion work has been stalled and no opening date has been published. I ate at the Duke and stayed a night there on my trip, and both are now history rather than a recommendation. Look at the exterior on your way between Wittenbergplatz and Kurfürstendamm, and book a room somewhere that is open.

Bauhaus in Dessau

Dessau holds five of the fifteen sites and the largest number of original Bauhaus buildings in the world, which makes it the one city on this route you should not cut. The school was here from 1925 to 1932, this is where architecture entered the curriculum, and this is where the products, buildings and ideas that define the movement took their final form.

5. The Bauhaus Building

The Bauhaus Building is the school’s own premises and the single most recognisable building of the movement, and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When it went up, its box-like volumes, glass curtain wall and bridge over the road amounted to an architectural language nobody had seen. It held a workshop wing, a festive area with a stage and canteen, and a studio block for students.

Admission is €14 ($16, £12), or €8 ($9, £7) reduced. Public guided tours cost from €7 ($8, £6) on top of the ticket, and they are worth it here more than anywhere else on the route, because the building’s logic is in how the wings connect rather than in anything on a label.

You can also sleep in it. The studio building, the Prellerhaus, was finished in 1926 with 28 studio rooms where the Bauhäusler lived and worked; 23 of them are let today, each around 24 m² (258 sq ft), furnished with tubular steel, a large desk and a washbasin, with showers on each floor. Some rooms are dedicated to particular residents, among them Josef and Anni Albers, Alfred and Gertrud Arndt and Franz Ehrlich. Rooms are booked through a form on the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s site rather than through a hotel channel, so ask early.

6. The Masters’ Houses

The Masters’ Houses, or Meisterhäuser, stand a short walk from the school building and were designed by Walter Gropius to house the Bauhaus teachers and their families. There are seven in total: three semi-detached pairs and one detached house for the director. All seven were drawn to the same plan and then turned at right angles to each other so no two read the same from the street.

White geometric volumes, clean lines, flat roofs. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky lived here. The houses were restored and reopened in the 1990s and are on the UNESCO World Heritage List with the school building. You can walk the grounds and go inside, except for the one used as an artist’s residence; some interiors have been reconstructed to their 1920s state and others serve as exhibition space. Admission is €10 ($12, £9), or €6 ($7, £5) reduced, and guided tours run about an hour.

7. Bauhaus Museum Dessau

The Bauhaus Museum Dessau opened in September 2019 in the city’s central park, and it is a building inside a building: a black concrete box with no natural light, to protect the objects, suspended on the upper floor inside a glass envelope. The ground floor holds the café, the shop, an open exhibition area and a Bauhaus play park for children.

The collection runs to around 49,000 items and the displays work through how ideas formed in Dessau in the 1920s ended up in ordinary modern life. When I went, the focus was on the students’ own work and experiments, with audio stations and materials you were allowed to handle.

Admission is €10 ($12, £9), or €6 ($7, £5) reduced, with under-18s free. It opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm between March and October and from 10am to 5pm between November and February, and closes on Mondays. You need a time slot, and it is issued at the museum’s own desk rather than online, so go there first if you are doing several Dessau sites in a day.

8. The Kornhaus

The Kornhaus is a restaurant on the bank of the Elbe, commissioned by the city of Dessau in 1929 and named after the granary that stood on the site until the 1870s. Carl Fieger, who had worked with Gropius for years, set a two-storey rectangular block against a semicircular glass-fronted café that projects over the riverbank, and the curve answers the bend of the river. It is as clear a piece of Bauhaus thinking as anything in the city, and you can sit in it.

The food gets mixed reviews, so I went in the afternoon for a drink instead. The restaurant was full when I arrived, which I had not expected; there were two tables by the bar in the entrance and I took one, had tea and a large slice of tangerine cheesecake, and paid €5.80 ($7, £5) in total at one of the most photographed buildings in Dessau.

It is at Kornhausstraße 146, 06846 Dessau-Roßlau, and it opens daily from noon to 9pm between March and October, with the kitchen closing at 8.30pm. From November to February it opens Wednesday to Sunday on the same hours and closes on Mondays and Tuesdays.

9. The Laubenganghäuser and the Törten estate

The Dessau-Törten estate is Gropius’s answer to the housing shortage of the Weimar Republic: 314 terraced houses built to be cheap, quickly and in series. It sits south of the centre and I ran out of time for it on my own trip, which is the one thing I would change about my route.

The five Houses With Balcony Access, the Laubenganghäuser, extend the estate and were designed by Hannes Meyer, the Swiss architect who followed Gropius as the school’s second director, in 1929. They hold 90 flats between them and were built for people on low incomes. The feature that gives them their name is the shared external gangway leading to a staircase at the front, meant to put neighbours in each other’s way on purpose. They are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The former Zeeck department store, also on the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s ticket, costs €10 ($12, £9), or €6 ($7, £5) reduced.

Getting between the Dessau sites. The walks between them are longer than they look on a map, and Dessau’s bus line 10 is the Bauhaus line that links them. Check it on the day: services on line 10 have been suspended at points during 2026 for staffing reasons and altered by roadworks, with tram line 1 and bus lines 11, 12 and 17 named as the alternatives. The operator publishes current changes at dvv-dessau.de.

Bauhaus in Weimar

Weimar holds six of the fifteen sites and the deepest collection, because this is where the school was founded in 1919 and where Gropius’s own hoard of Bauhaus objects stayed. Walk the streets and you will not see much Bauhaus; the city is largely classical. The Bauhaus here is indoors, in five museums and houses, plus one university building.

One practical thing to know: the rights to several Bauhaus artists’ works are held by an organisation that does not permit visitor photography of the interiors at these sites, so I could not publish pictures from inside any of them, here or on social media. You will have to go and look.

10. Bauhaus-Museum Weimar

The Bauhaus-Museum Weimar is the city’s overdue monument to its own role in the movement, designed by Heike Hanada as a plain white cube and opened in April 2019. It holds the oldest Bauhaus collection in the world, put together by Walter Gropius himself, alongside temporary shows.

Admission is €11 ($13, £9), or €8 ($9, £7) reduced, and €4 ($5, £3) for students aged 16 to 20. In the summer season, which runs 21 March to 1 November, it opens Wednesday to Monday from 10am to 6pm and closes on Tuesdays; winter hours are shorter and split across the week, so check before a November to March visit. Book a time slot for this one as well.

11. Haus Am Horn

Haus Am Horn is the only true Bauhaus building in Weimar and the first building anywhere put up to Bauhaus principles, which makes it the one unmissable stop in the city. It is a small white rectangular box of steel and concrete with a flat roof, designed by Georg Muche as a model house for the school’s first exhibition in 1923, and it was meant to anchor a whole estate that funding cuts and the move to Dessau killed off.

Inside, the displays explain why it is laid out the way it is, with the living room at the centre and the service rooms arranged around it. The garden is open too. Admission is €7 ($8, £6), or €5 ($6, £4) reduced. It is a seasonal site, open from 21 March to 1 November, Wednesday to Monday from 10am to 6pm, and closed on Tuesdays, so a winter trip to Weimar will miss it.

12. Museum Neues Weimar

Museum Neues Weimar holds the permanent exhibition “Van de Velde, Nietzsche and Modernism around 1900”, which covers the people who cleared the ground for the Bauhaus rather than the school itself. It asks what it was about Weimar that made this the place, and how Friedrich Nietzsche, Harry Graf Kessler, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Henry van de Velde shaped the thinking, using objects, sketches and 3D reconstructions.

The building is worth the ticket on its own: it opened in the mid-19th century as the Grand Ducal Museum and still has the staircase and ceiling heights to prove it. Admission is €8 ($9, £7), or €6 ($7, £5) reduced. In the summer season it opens Wednesday to Monday from 10am to 4pm and closes on Tuesdays.

13. Haus Hohe Pappeln

Haus Hohe Pappeln is the house Henry van de Velde built for himself, on a plot lined with tall poplars that he bought at the end of 1906, and he lived there with his wife Maria and their five children until 1917. Van de Velde was the Belgian architect who ran the Weimar school of applied arts that became the Bauhaus, and he designed every part of this house himself, from the wall colours and upholstery to the fittings.

He and his family were forced to sell and leave Germany in 1917 as hostility to foreigners rose during the First World War. The house is a museum now, restored to Van de Velde’s own plans, and the tour takes in the garden and the living rooms including the dining room, the salon and the refurnished study. It is covered by the ModerneCard, and it keeps the Klassik Stiftung’s seasonal calendar, so check the day before you go.

14. The Nietzsche-Archiv

The Nietzsche-Archiv documents the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche and was set up by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in Villa Silberblick, the house where he spent his final years. After his death she commissioned Henry van de Velde to remodel it, and the ground-floor rooms he made are among the most complete things he left: the former dining room, the library and lecture room and the archivist’s office, preserved almost entirely as one designed whole. Germans call that a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.

It costs €4.50 ($5, £4), or €3.50 ($4, £3) reduced, and €1.50 ($2, £1) for students aged 16 to 20, which makes it the cheapest ticket in Weimar. There is a free audio guide in English that takes 20 minutes, or 30 if you play the extra commentaries, and it is well made.

15. The main building of the Bauhaus University

The Bauhaus University’s main building was designed by Henry van de Velde and finished in 1911 for what was then one of the most influential art academies in Europe, and in 1919 it became the centre of the Bauhaus school. It was renovated in 1999, is now the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, and is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

It is a working university, so the thing to do is step inside for the dramatic spiral staircase; student-led tours are available. The Bauhaus Atelier outside works as a shop and coffee bar, and the terrace is pleasant when the weather allows.

The Weimar Card and the ModerneCard

Two cards cover Weimar and they are not the same product, so pick by how long you are staying. The Weimar Card is the tourist board’s, costs €32.50 ($38, £28) and runs for 48 hours from first use, which you activate by writing your name, the date and the time on the back; a 96-hour version costs €59.50 ($70, £51). It covers museum entry, public transport and the tourist office’s public guided tours. The ModerneCard is the Klassik Stiftung’s, costs €17 ($20, £15), or €12 ($14, £10) reduced and €7 ($8, £6) for students aged 16 to 20, and gives a full year of entry to exactly the five modernist sites above: Bauhaus-Museum Weimar, Museum Neues Weimar, Haus Am Horn, Haus Hohe Pappeln and the Nietzsche-Archiv.

Do the arithmetic. The five Weimar sites bought separately come to more than €30, so if the Bauhaus is the reason you are in Weimar and you are not using the buses much, the €17 ModerneCard is the cheaper of the two. Two free days are worth knowing about as well: admission to every Klassik Stiftung site is free all day on 8 March 2026 and on 18 November 2026.

Bauhaus tickets compared

Five cards and combined tickets cover this route, and they overlap. The table sets out what each one actually buys.

The BauhausCard is the one that makes sense if you are doing all three cities on one trip, because it crosses institutions rather than sitting inside one. The Bauhaus Kooperation publishes what it covers at bauhauskooperation.de, which is also where the old bauhaus100.com centenary site now points.

Getting from Berlin to Dessau and Weimar

Do this route by train, in the order Berlin, Dessau, Weimar, because that is both the school’s own chronology and the straightest line south. All three cities sit on the national rail network, Dessau and Weimar are both small enough to do on foot once you are there, and a car is a liability in central Weimar.

Dessau works as a day trip from Berlin if you start early, and it works better as an overnight if you want the Bauhaus Building, the Masters’ Houses and the museum without watching the clock. Weimar needs a night of its own: the Klassik Stiftung sites close by 6pm and several close earlier or shut for the season. To compare German rail fares and journey times, look before you fix the dates, because regional fares move with the day of the week and the advance-purchase window.

For beds, Dessau is the tight spot of the three, with a small centre and limited rooms in summer, so book it first and fit Berlin and Weimar around it. Browse hotels across Germany once the two train legs are settled, and for a longer stay with a kitchen, check the apartments listed on Vrbo.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

Five things would have changed how I planned this trip, and the first two can cost you a whole day.

1. Get the Dessau time slot before anything else. The Bauhaus Museum Dessau issues its timed tickets at its own desk rather than online, so walking up mid-afternoon can mean a slot after closing. Go to the museum first, take the slot, then do the Bauhaus Building while you wait.
2. Haus Am Horn is seasonal. It opens 21 March to 1 November and closes on Tuesdays. It is the first building ever built to Bauhaus principles and the one thing in Weimar you cannot substitute, so a November to March trip needs planning around it or accepting the loss.
3. Do not go to the Tiergarten for the Bauhaus-Archiv. The Gropius building has been shut since 2018 and is due back around the end of 2027. The collection’s public face is the free temporary bauhaus-archiv in Charlottenburg, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
4. Photography is not allowed inside the Weimar houses. Rights to several artists’ works sit with an organisation that does not permit it, which caught me out. Plan to look rather than shoot, and bring something to write with.
5. Pay for the guided tour at the Bauhaus Building, not at the museums. It costs from €7 on top of the ticket, and the building is the one site on this route where the point is in the plan rather than on the labels. The museums carry their own audio guides and English plaques.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from the trip she made through Berlin, Dessau and Weimar visiting the Bauhaus school buildings, the Masters’ Houses and the Weimar houses of Henry van de Velde. The team covers Germany for independent travellers, including the museum tickets, city cards, rail routes and hotels worth booking around the Bauhaus sites, and updates this page when opening seasons, prices and building works change.