DESSAU-ROßLAU.- The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation officially opened the two main exhibitions of its anniversary programme “To the Core. Bauhaus Dessau 100” today, Saturday 28 March at 11 am. The opening is followed this weekend by an extensive programme of events for the public – featuring exhibitions, curator-led tours, short talks on the historic Bauhaus stage and a “Metallic Dance Club” in the evening. Admission to the Bauhaus Building and the former Zeeck department store is free this weekend.

The focus is on the two exhibitions “Glass | Concrete | Metal” (until 10 January 2027) in the historic workshop wing of the Bauhaus Building and “Algae | Debris | CO2” (until 27 September 2026) in the former Zeeck department store, not far from the Bauhaus Museum. In addition, there are three further presentations at historic Bauhaus sites in Dessau, which extend the anniversary programme into the urban space.

One hundred years after the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, the anniversary programme focuses on the material, economic and technological foundations of design at the Bauhaus. At the same time, the exhibitions link the history of the Bauhaus with current issues concerning resources, recycling, material cycles and ecological change.

Glass | Concrete | Metal
28.3.2026–10.1.2027
Bauhaus Building Gropiusallee 38

The Bauhaus Building as a material manifesto of modernity

When the Workshop Wing of the Bauhaus Building opened in Dessau on 4 December 1926, it radiated like a glass cube – an architectural manifestation of Neues Bauen (New Building). The fascination but also scepticism of more than a thousand visitors resulted not only from the unusual, windmill-like ground plan but also from the innovative building materials used by Walter Gropius and explored in the designs by the school’s’ workshops.

Nearly a century later, the exhibition Glass | Concrete | Metal in the historical Workshop Wing looks at precisely these materials. It examines the close ties of work at the Bauhaus to the industrial history of the early twentieth century and asks about the often-overlooked material, economic, and technological foundations of the iconic Bauhaus Building and its workshop production.

The three-part exhibition shows historical photographs, tools, documents, and equipment to offer insight into aspects of the history of the Bauhaus that have received little attention. It asks about the formats of this modern aesthetic of the everyday, about manufacturing process, production sites, working conditions, and obtaining raw materials hidden behind the smooth, clean surfaces of steel tube and glass façades.

Glass | Concrete | Metal follows trading routes and resource streams that were tied to profoundly unequal colonial and imperial economic relationships and geopolitics. The exhibition addresses the complications and fault lines but also the breakthroughs associated with the innovations in materials in the early 1920s – and thus builds a bridge to current debates on sustainability, resource justice, and global conditions of production.

Glass

At the beginning of the twentieth century, glass as a construction material become one of the most important media for a new view of architecture. “Glass architecture”, Walter Gropius wrote in 1926, reveals “a changed perception of space that reflects the principle of movement, of our era’s traffic in a loosening of building volumes and spaces that negates the terminating wall and seeks to preserve the connection of the interior to the surroundings.” Turned into a transparent material by subjecting mineral solids to heat, glass is the stuff of artificial transformation – and thus also embodies the very upheavals of the modern era.

The first section of the exhibition examines the technological, aesthetic, and symbolic dimensions of this material that rethought architecture and changed our view of the world.

Concrete

The basic structure of the Bauhaus Building is a reinforced-concrete load- bearing structure. The second section focuses on what it meant when the Bauhaus was being built in 1925/26 to realise such a construction and what assumptions, general conditions, and processes were associated with it.

Concrete made new architectural freedoms and constructions possible. At the same time, the exhibition addresses the considerable interventions in the landscape and ecosystems that went along with extracting raw materials for the production of concrete – both then and now. The equivocality of this building material between innovation and ecological contamination becomes just as obvious as its central role for modernity.

Metal

In the teaching at and products from the metal workshop, in the designs for the Steel House, and with Tanz in Metall (Dance in Metal) on the Bauhaus Stage, a new, utopian will to design unfolded as well as an orientation around the industrial product. This enthusiasm extended to others’ experiments with technology like those of the Junkers factory in Dessau.

Steel and aluminium became the preferred metals at the Bauhaus because it was now primarily concerned with designing lamps and metal furniture in keeping with the Bauhaus architecture projects. But the third section of the exhibition also shows that extracting and processing metals represented intensive exploitation of natural resources and human labour – aspects that have long been overlooked in the history of the reception of the Bauhaus.

Algae | Debris | CO2
28.3.–27.9.2026
Ïormer Zeeck department store Kavalierstra.e 72, Dessau

The former Zeeck department store in downtown Dessau is the point of departure for the exhibition Algae | Debris | CO2. Opened in 1908 and e panded in the 1920, the building is an outstanding e ample of modernist department-store architecture, and its material layers tell a story of the city lasting more than a century.

The exhibition makes this history visible: Within the framework of the exhibition, so-called time windows at the stairs, floors, pillars, and ceiling provide views of the material history of the building. What seems unchanged at first glance reveals on closer inspection a sensitive approach to the historical building fabric. Ïlaking plaster is removed, holes are filled, whatever can be repaired is repaired or renovated – for example, old windowpanes or the panels of the Hetaflex aluminium façade, which were removed when the façade was renovated in the spring of 2025. Additions such as the ceiling lighting system and repairs of the floor covering in the 1980s follow the principles of reusability.

Algae | Debris | CO2 is a “model exhibition” for sustainable design intended to produce as little CO2 as possible. It is a space for display, use, and events all at once. It presents cross-disciplinary approaches to research and collaborative work in which human and non-human actors, economies, technologies, and material streams come together. The exhibition centres on alternatives to the canon of materials of (classical) Modernism: for example, clay, mycelia, algae, and geopolymer concrete based on clay, basalt, flax, and recycled materials. Ïor example, the InMyco project at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences is developing innovative mycelia materials, while waste materials from regional agriculture, forestry, and industry are used as substrates.

A micro-habitat has been initiated in the courtyard of the former department store that will develop on its own. This was done as part of the “Habitat Weaves” project, which reconceived overlooked urban spaces as habitats for several species.

Tradespeople, small and larger companies, researchers, designers, and artists were closely together here. Building is understood to mean a joint process that is sparing with material resources and that needs to be updated constantly because it is subject to change. During the exhibition, model construction sites offer insight into these processes and workshops invite others to participate.

The dynamics and synergies triggered by the exhibition will have effects that outlast the Bauhaus centennial: Ïor example, the exhibition floor will be available for non-profit functions for at least three more years. Several projects will be started later over the course of time.

The history of the Zeeck department store

The Zeeck department store opened in 1908 and was expanded in the 1920s. In 1945, it became the HO department store and then in the 1960s the Magnet department store. Ïor a long time, its façade of blue slats and the name Magnet was a defining element of the cityscape. After the GDR collapsed, the building stood vacant. In the early 2000s, the Dinh family acquired the building and used part of it for its textile company. The Asian restaurant Įou is now located on the ground floor. In 2025, work began on removing the sheet-metal curtain façade and restoring the historical façade of the 1920s.