For the Bauhaus aficionado, Dessau remains the mother lode. Visit the key modernist Bauhaus building with its signature “Bauhaus” sign. About 10 minutes away are the white, cubed restored duplex Masters’ Houses, where you imbibe the vibes of Kandinsky, Muche, Schlemmer and Klee. The Feiningerhaus, where artist Lyonel Feininger lived with his family, now is home of the Kurt Weill Centre.

By the 1950s Gropius was returning to Germany to work and visit, but he always felt most at home in Berlin. The Bauhaus Archive, originally established in Darmstadt in 1960 by art historian Hans Maria Wingler, moved to Berlin in 1971. In the city where the Bauhaus died, it is ironic but fitting that the Bauhaus Archive/Museum of Design resides in a Gropius-designed building opened in 1979 on a lot that Gropius himself chose on the edge of Tiergarten Park. Here is the 1919–1933 history of the Bauhaus as the 20th-century’s most significant school of architecture, design and art, with a collection covering the entire spectrum. There is a small permanent display and changing thematic exhibitions. The library and document collection is the best of its kind and holds the Gropius papers.

Gropius’ first architectural commission after his move via London in 1937 to teach at Harvard was his own house in “unspoiled” countryside bordering an apple orchard in Lincoln, Mass. Here, in 1938 with a vocabulary of typical New England materials and forms, such as brick chimney, screened porch and fieldstone foundation, he juxtaposed materials that were rarely used in house interiors at the time, including glass block, chrome and industrial lighting fixtures.

Upholding Bauhaus philosophy, every aspect of the Gropius House, which is open to the public, and its landscape was designed for maximum efficiency and simplicity. Most of the house furniture originated in the Bauhaus workshops in Dessau. In his daughter’s room is the desk he designed for his office in Weimar that served him in Dessau and Berlin as well. Although much of the original artwork now resides in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, Mrs. Gropius kept works by friends, including Alexander Schawinsky, Max Ernst, László Moholy-Nagy, Henry Moore, Joseph Albers, Joan Miró and Herbert Bayer. The Gropius house, explains daughter Ati Gropius Johansen in Historic New England Magazine (Fall 2003), “was not conceived of as a monument to the Modern movement but designed and built according to its core beliefs, which makes it a natural laboratory in which to discover the Bauhaus approach to design and problem solving.” And so, the Bauhaus trail comes full circle, certainly with ideas and a visual idiom that continue to resonate into the 21st-century.

For those interested in further study, the Weimar Summer Course (June 22-July 6, 2008) is an intensive two-week art course taught in English. The first week is a study of Bauhaus ethics and aesthetics with Dr. Hildegard Kurt, cultural researcher in Berlin. The second week discusses these issues in relation to "social sculpture" (the expanded view of art that Joseph Beuys outlined as a strategy to foster humanity and ecological sustainability) with Shelley Sacks, former Beuys student and director of the world's first research center for Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University in England. summerkurse-weimar.de