16 Juli-- Day 22

howdy guys- God am I behind.

Stupid homework.

Anyway, we found ourselves in Dessau. First thing in the morning, we had a tour of the Bauhaus. It's kinda ugly in my opinion (and pretty much everybody else's) but the ideas behind it are really interesting.

To sum it up: "They tried."

Basically, the huge theme behind the entire movement was something along the lines of "Form follows function" (so Darwinism + architecture = Bauhaus(?))

The guy who designed this house (and pretty much built half of the freaking town) was a guy named something or another Gropius. He really loved clean lines, practicality, transparency, and to an extent, the mixture of industrial and domestic. Also the way shadows change when other parts of the building move

The most well-known side of this building

If you check out the photo of the Bauhaus, you can see that the first floor is a little bit recessed. Apparently he had the idea that if you looked at the building from above, like in a helicopter or something, it would seem like it was floating.

And everybody had their own diving board- oh wait, that's a balcony.

We couldn't take pictures inside without paying €3, and I wasn't that in love with it... but the inside was mostly the contrast between walls painted all primary colors, glass, and the simple metal appliances. I have to say, I fell in love with Gropius' desk. It was so simple, with such beautiful lines.

Later on we toured a bunch of very cubist, functional, and white houses that the "masters" of the Bauhaus university lived in.

The houses of the Masters. They all the looked the same, just rotated 180 and flipped.

The actual, non-Bauhaus houses...

The Schloss

Finally our required Bauhaus tour-making was over, and we could wander around. We ended up going into this Schloss, which was turned into a museum, where you could see lots of pictures like this:

beach wheeee

and this:she looked unbelievably real

and also this:

freaky, right?

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Anyway, we took the train to Weimar. We passed some awesome landscapes, so here's more photos.

Castle!

farmland!

So most of what we did that night was eat, then go to this winefest that was conveniently going on. Had some very good wine, danced with all the old people (seriously, they were all sooo oldddd) played some drinking games, and headed back to the hostel. More actual things about Weimar to come next.

winefest