Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the Fagus Factory than the stripped down Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the Völkisch Sommerfeld House. The Bauhaus Dessau is one of the iconic buildings of the 20th century.
As a result the artists left their homes in the complex of Masters’ Houses. Gropius House combined traditional elements of New England architecture—wood, brick, and fieldstone—with innovative materials including glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the latest technology in fixtures. Gropius designed the new Bauhaus Dessau school building in 1925-26 on commission from the city of Dessau. The cubic body of the building is accentuated by a protruding semi-circular staircase in the west and a terrace in the south. It is "regarded as a 'built manifesto' of the Bauhaus's ideas, in which the functionality and aesthetics of the design coalesce to form a single entity". When Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1923, he took over the school’s crucial preliminary course, and gave it a more practical, experimental, and technological bent, introducing a new emphasis on the unity of art and technology. Shortly before the end of the Second World War the houses of Walter Gropius and Lázló Moholy-Nagy were completely destroyed in an air raid. Fieger shows, in the design of the house, the hallmarks of his own unique approach, which differs from Gropius’s.
The house is the only design realised from a series of plans for small houses, which were to be built along rational lines and with flexible room partitions. As a matter of fact, the Bauhaus furniture in the house is the largest collection of furniture from the school outside of Germany. ... Gropius's house received a huge response and was declared a National Landmark in 2000. During the Dessau years, there was a remarkable change in direction for the school. It was designed by Walter Gropius and was officially opened on 4 December 1926, having taken just over a year to build. The Pump House with a Bauhaus connection was a modification of the wall built by Walter Gropius around his own residence. In Germany, a “pump house” or Trinkhalle is a refreshment stand, and as part of the general modernization of Dessau, a number of these stands were planned and constructed throughout the city. Moholy-Nagy’s gregarious disposition made him a natural teacher.
Interestingly enough, almost all of the furniture in the house was made in the Bauhaus workshops in Dessau, 1925, for the house Gropius designed as part of the Bauhaus Family Housing, with a few exceptions. The National Socialists’ victory in the local government elections in Dessau in 1932 led to the closure of the Bauhaus. It features furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and fabricated in Bauhaus workshops.