Spent the weekend of our wedding anniversary in the town of Dessau (some 120 km from Berlin). The city was largely destroyed during WWII, and while some buildings have been restored, the cityscape is to some extent marred by fairly ugly utilitarian architecture.
But, it does have two claims to fame (and World Heritage sites) - one is its proximity to the Garden Realm, a "cultural landscape" first created in the late 18th century that encompasses parks, palaces and gardens, and even an artificial volcano. The other World Heritage ensemble consists of the original Bauhaus College and several prime examples of Bauhaus architecture.
Finally, when the German government moved from Bonn to Berlin in the 1990s, federal agencies until then located in Berlin were relocated to the German states - Dessau "got" Germany's equivalent to the EPA, the "Umweltbundesamt" for which an all-new headquarter was built.
Above pics are from Oranienbaum palace, part of the Garden Realm.
(Above) The original Bauhaus. So much of what they introduced to architecture has for better or worse been incorporated into everyday buildings that it's hard to understand how revolutionary this was. Incidentally, the Bauhaus main period is almost completely synchronous with the Weimar Republic of the 1920s - the Nazis hated the Bauhaus and dissolved it.
The above pics are from a group of "Master Villas" built by the Bauhaus for some of the eminent artists of the day - Paul Klee, Lyonel Feiniger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy lived and worked here.
Outside...
..and inside of the Umweltbundesamt.
