The Master’s Houses

Municipal funding had also allowed Gropius to build a group of Masters’ houses in a small pinewood within walking distance of the new Bauhaus building. These consisted of three pairs of semi-detached houses with studios, each for two professors, and one detached house for himself. The ground-plans of these mirror-image semi-detached houses met at a 90° angle to each other and thus served to illustrate Gropius’ concept of the ‘large-scale building set’, even though it was not possible to use prefabricated elements in their construction. The houses, which the Masters rented from the municipal authorities, were furnished with remarkable generosity, astounding even the artists. Schlemmer wrote: “I was shocked when I saw the houses! I could imagine the homeless standing here one day watching the haughty artists sunning themselves on the roofs of their villas.” Klee later complained about the size of his heating bills, and he and Kandinsky sought to obtain a rent rebate from the municipal authorities. Some of the artists supplied their own interior colour schemes. Klee had his studio painted yellow and black; Kandinsky chose a rather eccentric decoration scheme, and even Muche experimented with colourful mural designs. Muche’s bedroom was painted to a scheme by Breuer. A contemporary visitor described the artists’ estate thus, “Everywhere the same purposeful horizontals, the same flat roofs and incisive straight lines of the frameless doors and windows, repeatedly surpassed by the glass wall of a studio. A living-machine objectively whose coldly uniform essence nevertheless incorporates, as on artistic component, the attractive play of light and shadow set in motion by the not yet grubbed trees.”

Gropius’ house was destroyed in the Second World War. The remaining houses were preserved, but have been drastically altered and are now in poor condition. on reducing the materials used and keeping the design functional.