The building Walter Gropius designed in Dessau for the Bauhaus school unites in one structure both the principle of modern architecture and the place where it was taught. Its structural heart is the glass curtain wall of the workshop wing.

The reinforced-concrete frame carries the floor slabs on columns set back inside the line of the facade. This frees the outer surface entirely of load: the wall, no longer bearing, can become a glass membrane from end to end. In the workshop wing Gropius turns this glass surface uninterrupted around the corners of the building — because there is no structural column or solid wall at the corner, the glass wraps the whole facade without being cut anywhere. This "hung glass curtain wall" shows to the eye that structure and envelope are now fully separated; it is the direct ancestor of the glass skyscrapers of the next century.

The plan, too, embodies a principle: the building is not a symmetrical, monumental mass. Gropius divides the functions — workshops, classrooms, administration, student housing — into separate wings and links them asymmetrically like a pinwheel. You cannot grasp the building from a single facade but only by moving around it; the form arises from the organisation of the functions within. The Bauhaus Dessau thus unites the concrete frame, the glass curtain wall, and functional plan separation to become the manifesto building of modern architecture.