The light that failed

A new exhibition at the Design Museum in London celebrates the work of the Bauhaus school, who believed that standardised buildings based on scientific principles could be beautiful and transform people's lives. Mark Hudson goes to Dessau, where it all began, to see what remains of the dream

The sweeping glass walls - the first of their kind, ancestors of the steel and glass towers of Chicago, Manhattan and London - glowed in the evening light. There, lurking amid Dessau's still suburban avenues, was one of the 20th century's classic utopias, where Walter Gropius aspired to fuse architecture, sculpture and painting into "a crystal symbol of a new faith that is to come".

The place seemed deserted, but the door opened easily. Upstairs were three sets of double doors - the circular chrome finger plates, illustrated in hundreds of books, still in place. One opened noisily into a packed lecture theatre. As I squeezed blushing into the only empty seat, I noticed it was a variant on Marcel Breuer's steel-framed "Wassily" chair - that 20th-century icon, now ubiquitous in the stylish interiors of the West.

Founded 81 years ago, the Bauhaus was the most influential art and design school of the 20th century, where the giants Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee all taught. Their ideas still pervade everything from table-lamp design to performance art.

The Nazis shut the Bauhaus in 1933. After decades of suppression, bombing and neglect, would there would be much left to see? But there I was, amid rows of fresh-faced East German youth, listening to a short, bearded architect, who was holding forth with a masterful fluency, not one word of which I could understand. It was as though, in the parallel reality of the GDR, the Bauhaus had just kept on going as Dessau's local tech.

In fact, the students belong to the local university, which still rents half the building. The war-shattered Bauhaus accommodated various rag-tag institutions, including a cottage hospital and a driving school before restoration in the 1970s. It only returned to the status of educational institution last autumn, with a small intake of international postgraduates. But the standing of the Bauhaus is higher than ever. Modernism - rebranded for our own times as "minimalism" - is in. Gropius's building, one of the key works of the whole movement, is now a Unesco World Heritage site.

And you can stay in the original student accommodation, the Atelier wing with its jutting cantilevered balconies. The showers are communal, the decor utilitarian, but it's cheap, comfortable enough, and I had the building practically to myself. More to the point, you're sleeping in the Bauhaus, as close as you could be to the "Spirit of the Modern".

In Dessau, a whole range of monuments testify to the time - not so long ago - when artists, designers and architects really believed they could create a New Man: that if people were given a better, more rationally determined environment, they would behave in a better and more rational way. The fact that you're seeing these things against the battered reality of the former GDR makes the lost hopes and shattered dreams all the more poignant.

The Bauhaus phenomenon was of course, fraught with contradictions. Born into an illustrious Prussian family, Gropius was at once a great idealist and a gifted natural impresario and manipulator. Inspired by American grain silos and ocean liners - forms evolved not by "designers", but through the exigencies of function - he promoted collaborative creativity. Yet two of his most significant appointments, Klee and Kandinsky, were supremely individualistic painters preoccupied with the transcendental and the non-rational. And what did Oskar Schlemmer's surreal Triadic Ballets, the Bauhaus's most famous stage performances, have to do with "scientific" functionalism?

And far from being clinical, the Bauhaus building has an aura of peculiar secular sanc tity, somewhat enhanced by the fact that it's in a less than perfect state of repair.

You're constantly looking through acres of window on to vast counterbalancing friezes of glass. Light vibrates through the harmoniously-proportioned white spaces, the burnished black floors reflecting clouds and sky.

Modern architecture, you recall, was always supposed to be beautiful and uplifting. You could feel it would be worth flattening any number of Palladian villas to live in a world like this. So what went wrong?

A few hundred yards away, set among pine trees, are the houses that Gropius designed for the school's top teachers. They're not exactly poky, but you feel a few extra feet wouldn't go amiss. It's as though everything's been squeezed to a democratic minimum to compensate for the grotesque inequities of the past. The fixtures and fittings, such as the cylindrical steel door handles, are the same as those throughout the Bauhaus. Forget "choice" - that clarion call of contemporary mediocrity. Standardisation was the ideal: everyone would have the most beautiful and functional door handle.

For his Törten housing estate in suburban Dessau, Gropius set up experimental living spaces, where experts analysed exactly how much space the inhabitants would need to perform household tasks, such as cooking, with the minimum amount of movement.

Generally described as "bleakly industrial", Dessau is actually a very green city, a place of allotments and wooded parks, of undulating cobbled avenues widened by cycle lanes and wildly overgrown verges. But the centre is pretty grim, its churches and gothic town hall hidden among vast graffiti-spattered housing estates. Passing the array of brutally enormous blocks, you wonder if this was the inevitable legacy of Bauhaus utopianism. Or is it simply that there have been mediocre architects in every period?

Aat the end of Franzstrasse, Törten's cubic, partially- prefabricated units are immediately recognisable, though what has happened to them is at once sad and somehow heartening.

An information board shows the street as it looked on completion: the houses sitting mathematically equidistant on the bare earth like an assembly line of fridges.

The idea that this sterile, quasi-industrial uniformity had represented a new Platonic ideal was oddly shocking. Then, a slight tilt of the head revealed the same view today: straight lines eased from alignment; fake mahogany doors added; rococo mail boxes; hard white replaced by cream, plum and that greyish crumbling ochre you see everywhere in the former GDR. Trees overhung the waist-high verges, and many gardens were so thick with roses and silver firs that the houses were invisible. But there's no graffiti or broken glass here. These houses are cared for. Their owners have destandardised them into cottages.

The attendant, a big, middle-aged woman, explained that Herr Gropius had set up a show house to demonstrate that slimline Bauhaus products were not only more suitable to these houses than bulky traditional furniture, but cheaper. "He said people couldn't bring their own furniture!" she said with indignation. "But they wouldn't stand for it!"

She was supposed to be giving me the official Bauhaus version but, having lived on the estate for 30 years, she kept slipping back to the residents' view. There was, she said, not a single window on the estate that hadn't been moved. "They were too high. People couldn't see out!" And from the first, nobody could cope with the tiny "scientifically-designed" kitchens.

It could be argued that the influence of the Bauhaus has been more lasting than that of the Nazi and Stalinist ideologies that crushed it. It wasn't itself free of the totalitarian impulses that characterised its period. But as I ate dinner that night at the Kornhaus, Carl Fieger's 1928 riverside restaurant, I watched the sun sinking into the Elbe beyond the curving sweep of the windows, and I felt as though I were looking back on the Bauhaus down a long tunnel of darkness, as a shining moment of hope and integrity.