When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, it already had six turbulent years behind it. Walter Gropius had founded a school that aimed to bring art and craftsmanship together in a new way. By then, that ambition had evolved: design was increasingly expected to engage with technology and industrial production. But political opposition in Weimar had deprived the Bauhaus of its foundation. The move became a forced farewell – and at the same time an opportunity to develop its ideas further.
Dessau offered a very different environment. The city was shaped by industry and technological progress. Aviation pioneer Hugo Junkers was based here and, together with Mayor Fritz Hesse, was one of the Bauhaus’s prominent supporters. The school was associated with very concrete expectations: new impulses for the city, contemporary housing and a closer connection between design and production. The future that had been debated so passionately in Weimar was now meant to take tangible form.
On 4 December 1926, the new Bauhaus building designed by Walter Gropius officially opened. The vast glass façade of the workshop wing revealed the activity inside. Buildings of different heights structured the areas for work, teaching and living. To fully understand the architecture, one had to move around it: there was no single monumental main façade.
Inside, too, the school put its own ideas into practice. Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture formed part of the interior, while Hinnerk Scheper’s colour scheme helped with orientation and gave the rooms their individual character. The metal workshop developed the lighting. Architecture and interior design were conceived in close relation to one another. For the first time, the Bauhaus was able to demonstrate in its own building how it imagined modern life.
The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation explicitly notes that Marianne Brandt, Hans Przyrembel and Max Krajewsky designed lighting for the building, with a large proportion of the lighting designs created by Brandt.
And life there was far more colourful than the famous black-and-white photographs might suggest. In the studio building, students and junior masters lived side by side. Shared meals, encounters and celebrations were just as much a part of the school as focused work in the workshops. Artistic curiosity continued on stage, in concerts and in experimental performances. For a few years, Dessau became a place where learning, working and living together were unusually closely connected.
The move towards industry had already begun in Weimar. Under László Moholy-Nagy, the metal workshop increasingly developed into a laboratory for design from 1923 onwards. Instead of producing only individual pieces, the aim was to create models suitable for serial production. In Dessau, this work was given a very concrete task: the new school building needed lighting.
This raised questions that went far beyond the appearance of an object. How could it be manufactured? Which materials were suitable? How could individual components be assembled, and how could a design be produced repeatedly?
From around 1928 in particular, links with industry became even closer. Collaborations with lighting manufacturers such as Schwintzer & Gräff in Berlin and Körting & Mathiesen in Leipzig, known for the Kandem brand, brought Bauhaus designs into industrial production.
One designer shaped this development more than most: Marianne Brandt.
Trained as a painter, Marianne Brandt turned to metalwork at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Moholy-Nagy recognised her talent and supported her in a workshop still largely dominated by men. Even her earliest works reveal the precision with which she examined everyday objects.
Her tea extract pot from 1924, produced today by TECNOLUMEN as the MBEK 24, appears almost like a small spatial composition. A hemisphere forms the body, the dark handle creates a strong accent, and the lid sits slightly off-centre. Yet every element serves a purpose: the small pot was designed for preparing concentrated tea, which could then be diluted with hot water.
The precious materials used in historic versions – silver and ebony – also reveal a contradiction within the early Bauhaus years. How could the ambition to create design for many people be reconciled with such elaborately crafted objects? The tea pot therefore also represents a school that was still searching for answers to the question of modern serial production.
Brandt’s focus on use is equally evident in two of her best-known early designs: the MB 23 E and MB 24 ashtrays from 1924.
With the MB 23 E, the function lies directly in its construction. The cylindrical container features a tilting lid. Ash falls into the container below, while the lid largely closes it off at the same time. It is a simple mechanism that was later adopted in a similar form by numerous ashtray designs.
The MB 24 plays even more explicitly with elementary shapes. A brass hemisphere stands on three small triangular feet, topped by a removable lid with a triangular opening. Sphere, circle and triangle are not applied as decoration; they form the object itself. The design was already illustrated in Walter Gropius’s 1925 Bauhaus book New Works from the Bauhaus Workshops.
The tea extract pot and the ashtrays were still created in Weimar. Yet they already contain many of the principles that would define Brandt’s work in Dessau: a limited vocabulary of geometric forms, visible construction and a close observation of what an object actually needs to achieve in everyday use.
Brandt’s own standard remained correspondingly practical. Looking back, she wrote: “No pot ever left our workshop unless it poured without dripping.” For Brandt, the beauty of an object had to prove itself in use.
With the move to Dessau, the scale changed. The task was no longer simply to create individual objects for a table. The new Bauhaus building needed lighting for workshops, corridors, staircases and workplaces.
Anyone walking through the Bauhaus building today can therefore experience Brandt’s ideas not only in a display case. Her lamps form part of the spatial experience itself. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, for example, shows a spherical Marianne Brandt lamp in the staircase – precisely where light, architecture and movement directly intersect.
In 1925, together with Hans Przyrembel, Brandt created the pendant lamp now produced by TECNOLUMEN as the HMB 25. A hemispherical metal shade directs the light downwards. In the version with pulley and counterweight, the height can be adjusted, allowing the lamp to adapt directly to the task at hand. Lamps of this kind were produced in the metal workshop and used in the Bauhaus workshops themselves.
One year later, further lighting solutions were developed for the new building. Marianne Brandt’s DMB 26 from 1926 demonstrates a completely different approach. Three slender rods and a ring hold an opal glass sphere beneath a circular ceiling plate. Its construction can be understood at a glance. The glass distributes the light softly throughout the room, while the structure remains visible. Its effect comes from the relationship between just a few carefully coordinated elements.
Also designed in 1926 was the HMB 27. Once again, an opal glass sphere forms the centre, but this time it is suspended from three fine chains. The construction appears almost weightless: ring, sphere and chains are enough to create a complete lamp from only a handful of components. The model was already being produced serially at the time.
The HMB 29 takes the principle of the spherical lamp a step further. Here, the form is articulated solely through the treatment of the glass: the upper half is acid-matted, while the lower half is made of glossy white opal glass. No additional ornament is required – light, surface and geometric form become the design itself.
A Schwintzer & Gräff catalogue from 1928/29 documented the design with precise illustrations and dimensions. These documents later made it possible for TECNOLUMEN to reintroduce the lamp in a version faithful to the original.
The HMB 25, DMB 26, HMB 27 and HMB 29 demonstrate how differently Brandt could respond to a single task. In one design, a metal shade concentrates the light; in another, an opal glass sphere distributes it softly throughout the room. Sometimes rods define the construction, sometimes chains, sometimes a single slender suspension.
It is precisely this diversity that shows why “Bauhaus” never meant one single type of lamp. What mattered was finding a convincing solution through the relationship between function, material and production.
From 1927 onwards, Brandt was responsible for the lighting experiments in the metal workshop. In 1928, she temporarily took over its leadership and worked with other Bauhaus designers on products intended for industrial manufacture. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation emphasises that Brandt was already collaborating closely with industry during the design phase and that numerous lamps based on her designs entered industrial production.
The Bauhaus approach to design extended even to an object we touch every day, usually without giving it much thought: the door handle.
Walter Gropius had developed his famous handle together with Adolf Meyer in 1922. In 1926, it was used in the Bauhaus building in Dessau. Here, too, the story leads from Weimar to Dessau. A solution developed earlier became part of a comprehensive approach to interior and architectural design.
From 1923 onwards, the Gropius handle was produced in series by the Berlin company S. A. Loevy. TECNOLUMEN has manufactured the Gropius models since 1983; today they are part of the TECNOLINE collection. Door and window handles connect architecture with direct physical experience: we see the design and literally hold it in our hands every time we use it.
The Bauhaus was active in Dessau for only seven years, from 1925 to 1932. All three directors – Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – shaped the development of the school during this period. Yet in those few years, numerous buildings and objects were created that continue to define our image of modernism today.
The Dessau chapter came to an end in 1932. After the National Socialists gained a political majority on the Dessau city council, the city decided to dissolve the school. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe subsequently continued the Bauhaus privately in Berlin for a short time. In 1933, its history finally came to an end.
The objects remained.
At TECNOLUMEN and TECNOLINE, their story can still be experienced through use today: from Marianne Brandt’s tea extract pot and ashtrays to her lamps for the Bauhaus building in Dessau and the Gropius handle.
And Marianne Brandt’s work in particular demonstrates just how far the Bauhaus idea could extend. From a small object held in one hand to a lamp that shapes an entire room, she repeatedly addressed the same fundamental question: how can an everyday object be made simpler, more functional and at the same time naturally beautiful?
Perhaps that is precisely why these ideas, almost a century old, still feel so close to us today.
A pot still needs to pour well. A handle still needs to feel good in the hand. A lamp still needs to provide good light.
And design is perhaps at its most convincing when, in everyday use, we hardly need to think about any of these things at all.
