A Room at the Bauhaus

Dessau isn't the most attractive town in eastern Germany. The British flattened it in the 1940s and the Soviets towerblocked it after the war. The city seems an unlikely destination for an architectural pilgrimage, but hidden away behind the station is one of the great buildings of the 20th century, the Bauhaus.

I booked a room in the Atelierhaus [student wing] of the Bauhaus for 25 euros a night. The room was high up on the third level of the building with a shiny crimson floor and a tiny lipped balcony. Internal walls were painted white to create the illusion of more space and furniture was sturdy and functional; just a bed, coat stand, storage unit and two Marcel Breuer chairs tucked under a table. Two spotlights threw shadows around the walls and I quickly tidied my possessions away. This wasn’t a room that would tolerate mess.

I remembered my own halls of residence in the north of England; the nylon carpet and the wonky shelves. Nothing like this. I used the balcony and the clear February night to chill my Riesling.

There are other Bauhaus buildings dotted around Dessau. Walter Gropius designed a low brick Employment Office and a whole suburb was built to a Bauhaus spec. Beautifully preserved are the four Meisterhausers Gropius added for the college teachers and their wives. These are now open to the public and restored closely to their original design. Beautiful as they are they appear more museum than house. Door handles are gleaming and the smell of fresh paint hangs in the stairwells. The clutter and spills of daily life have been removed.

My favourite building was the Kornhaus restaurant, a lovely sweep of glass designed by Carl Fieger in the late 1920s. I got lost in the woods looking for it and then discovered I only had eight euros in my pocket when I arrived. I ordered a salad and a fruit juice from the menu and hurried out after leaving a measly fifty-cent tip. It was the last of my cash!

Before I left Dessau, I bought a 1950s Wagenfeld cup and double saucer from the Bauhaus shop. It was so nice I bought the rest of the set from ebay for about £100 when I got back to London. A week later I was photographing some Bauhaus-inspired houses in Stanmore and found an identical set in a charity shop for £5.

Lviv, Ukraine, March 2008

Patience, I was told. You need patience to travel in Ukraine. This isn’t a cheapjet central European destination and there are no stag parties or direct flights to Stansted. English isn’t a natural second language and the alphabet is cloaked in Cyrillic. These are the things that attracted me to Ukraine.
I flew into Kyiv and then directly up to Lviv or Lvov or Lwow or even Lemberg. This is a city with plenty of names and many previous owners. It sits in the far west and once formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before rapidly changing hands between Poland, Nazi Germany, USSR and presently Ukraine. The word Ukraine, means Borderland and Lviv was its literal definition.

It’s a pretty city with a beautiful main square and hundreds of churches. I rented an apartment above the Drama Theatre in the old quarter. Squeaky parquet flooring alerted my neighbours to my precise location at any time. A market filled the outside square selling wooden tankards and Soviet medals and in the evening drunks sang below my window.

Next to the Drama Theatre stood the Opera House, built during the Hapsburg years and gloriously ornate. Then, in front of the opera house; a pig! Its snout rooting in the grass as a crowd gathered. I bought a ticket to the ballet and sat dead-centre in the upper balcony, £5 well spent. The building gleamed inside and Swan Lake floated across the stage. This was my very first ballet and I was entranced.

This constant changing of hands has benefited Lviv’s café culture. Viennese espressos competed with thicker, sludgy coffees and Lipton’s tea, drunk black, was an everpresent. In the evenings I moved on to local lager or sweet sparkling wine from Odessa.

Under the watchful eye of Ivan Fedorov, Russia's first publisher, and backing against the Church of the Assumption was a book market. Tolstoy sat next to Thomas the Tank Engine alongside Reggie Kray's memoirs. I found two 1970s Soviet guidebooks, one with faded photographs of Lviv, the other with paintings of Minsk showing strolling couples in picturesque parks. In the former, Lenin statues kept an eye on proceedings and if you wanted culture where better than the Museum of Atheism, housed in a baroque church?

I stood for ages in the rain waiting for a marshrutka to the airport for the red-eye to Kyiv. These minivans hurtle around town following complicated routes. I deciphered the Cyrillic in the windscreen and flagged one down. Fifteen minutes later and we were still in the city. I double-checked with the other passengers, "Aeroport?" "Nyet!" came the chorused reply followed by furious pointing in the opposite direction. I jumped out in a dreary suburb, crossed the road and the rain fell harder. Eventually another marshrutka came along and this time my "Aeroport?" query was answered with nodding heads. I folded myself against the back windshield and passed my fare over many heads to the driver. My glasses steamed up. Finally, through a smeary window I saw a plane landing and squeezed out. Patience was the best thing I packed.

Kyiv, Ukraine, April 2008

I knew things would be a little difficult in Kyiv when I spotted Air Force One on the tarmac as I landed. Major roads in the city were blocked off and the police were at every junction. In Independence Square, scene of the Orange Revolution in 2004, an anti-NATO rally was in full swing. Hammer & sickle flags flew over a makeshift stage and martial music blasted into my hotel room at the other end of the square.

I felt as if I was an extra in a cold-war drama & began to double back on myself to shake off potential spies. I kept getting lost, frantically turning corners like a headless chicken. Kyiv was difficult to map mentally and I pitied those on my tail, real or imaginary. The hotel was owned by the Ministry of Defence and my room felt as if Stalin had broken in and stolen everything that wasn't brown. Twice the phone rang and yet each time I answered, there was silence.

In a way George Bush helped me out. I had to find a way around the blockages and followed the locals scaling walls and sliding down grassy banks. I saw a side of the city that was off the map and a little muddy.

I walked to Dynamo Kyiv’s stadium, sunk into a bowl and surrounded by chestnut trees. A statue to legendary coach Valery Lobanovsky sat outside, perched on the bench in an era before chalked technical areas. He looked trim in bronze but an adjacent billboard showed him in later years, bloated and blotchy. A bridge spanned the ring-road below and connected the parks on either side. Clamped to the bridge, amid the football graffiti, were thousands of padlocks; lovers initials etched or inked into the metal.

In two days, I covered a lot of ground, visiting the monasteries of Pecherska Lavra, discovering a glimpse of the intensity of Eastern Orthodox religion in the caves that ran underneath. I ate at a restaurant with an 18th century rustic theme and watched football in a modern Irish pub. On the Andriyivskyi Descent I was confused by Bulgakov’s birthplace and sobered by the Chernobyl museum in Podil with its mutated river creatures and ghost town signs. And all the time behind and in front of me, the golden domes of Kyiv’s churches.

I left Kyiv, walking up to the metro station under a night sky just beginning to blue. Aside from streetsweepers and dog walkers, I was on my own and the city looked peaceful; no barricades or police or Death to the Imperial West banners. I dived into the metro, down into the depths of the earth, through beautiful brick arches and clean-tiled caverns and followed the President of the USA back to the west.