The individual functions – workshop, living, school, etc. – were assigned distinct parts of the building. From the workshop building, with its teaching spaces for the Bauhaus, a bridge with rooms for the administration, the building department and Gropius’s private architectural office led over to the building wing for the separate technical school. In the other direction, a low-rise building with the auditorium, stage area and canteen formed a connection to the studio block with its student apartments. “One must walk around this structure in order to understand the three-dimensional character of its form and the function of its parts”, Gropius later wrote about the Dessau buildings in volume 12 of the Bauhaus Books. This three-dimensional character could best be understood in its entirety from a bird’s eye view. Even the article about the new Bauhaus building in the first issue of bauhaus magazine, published to coincide with the 1926 opening, was accompanied by such an aerial photograph.
A bird’s eye view was unusual at that time, as was the building complex itself, with its smooth, white-plastered façade and its reinforced concrete and glass materials. Due to “its sparkling insubstantiality, and the way it seems to float [...] imponderably as the air”, Gropius also expected the latter to inspire the “affection of the modern architect” and its unbounded use. On the evening of the opening, the building was also set in scene accordingly for the amazed visitors. With “all the rooms [...] illuminated, as they were on the opening day”, recalls a contemporary onlooker, they “form a light-cube, squared and framed throughout on the outside by the iron structure”. The celebration lasted until the morning hours.
