Bauhaus UNESCO World Heritage Sites

They wanted to change society - and created a completely new, radical architecture. To this day, the modern ideas of Bauhaus School teachers and alumni remain influential. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar. Its first director was Walter Gropius. The school buildings in Weimar, designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, are now World Heritage Sites.

The Haus am Horn in Weimar is also a World Heritage Site. Built in 1923, it now looks simple and unspectacular. But back then a commitment to simplicity was revolutionary: bright, modern, affordable, and built with a functional layout and innovative materials. The building is the prototype for an estate to house the relatives of Bauhaus members.

In 1925 the Bauhaus School had to move to Dessau. The new conservative government in Weimar cut the school's funding because it considered it "left-wing." Dessau marked the start of its cooperation with industry and creation of the first tubular steel cantilever chair, the Wassily chair. The school building in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius, is now considered a key European modernist work.

In Dessau three double houses were built in which the Bauhaus masters lived, including Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee. They were also bold visions for modern living: functional, with large windows that were meant to create a link between exterior and interior. In 1928 Walter Gropius resigned as Bauhaus director. He was succeeded by Hannes Mayer and in 1930 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In 1932, Mies van der Rohe moved again with the Bauhaus: in Berlin he ran it for a year as a private institution before the Bauhaus School had to close in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. Nonetheless, between 1913 and 1934 several modernist housing estates were built in Berlin. Six of them are now World Heritage Sites, among them the Siemensstadt Estate, on which Gropius also worked.

The Bauhaus members brought elegance and light into the world of work. The Fagus factory in Lower Saxony was designed by Walter Gropius together with architect Adolf Meyer. Its cubist forms, abundance of steel and glass and bright factory rooms are typical. It's considered a forerunner of the later Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and is a World Heritage Site. Shoe lasts are still produced here.

Industrial mining architecture: the buildings of the Rammelsberg ore mines in Goslar are preeminent examples of the Bauhaus-inspired Neues Bauen (New Building) style. The architects Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer designed them in 1936. Ore was extracted here until 1988. The Rammelsberg complex is now a museum and visitors' mine.

Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer are also responsible for designing the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen. This gigantic industrial complex was built between 1927 and 1932. Now the Zollverein complex is protected by UNESCO as testimony to the heyday of heavy industry in Europe. Coal was mined here for 135 years. The mine was decommissioned in 1986.

The Bauhaus architects also exported their artistic and innovative ideas abroad. In 1930 in the Czech city of Brno, the Villa Tugendhat was finished according to plans by the later Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe. It was commissioned as a home by industrialist Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Grete. The villa is now an icon of modernist architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

After Hitler took power in 1933, many Jews fled to Palestine, among them Bauhaus alumni. Affordable housing had to be created for the many new immigrants. In Tel Aviv, the White City, a collection of more than 4000 buildings, was created between 1933 and 1948, designed mainly by German Jewish architects. It, too, is a World Heritage Site.

Germany's newest World Heritage Sites are two homes in the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, a housing estate in the Neues Bauen style. Both houses were designed in 1927 by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, whose 17 building projects in seven countries are on the World Heritage list. Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius also designed houses in the Weissenhof Estate.

The ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, near Berlin, was completed in 1930. The second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer and his partner Hans Wittwer designed the complex. It was built by the Bauhaus construction department. The Trade Union School in Bernau has now been included on the World Heritage list as an extension of the already-listed sites in Weimar and Dessau.

These now hold "World Heritage status": the Laubengang Houses in the Törten district of Dessau. The five apartment blocks were built under the supervision of Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer.