The Dessau Masters’ Houses were based on the original designs of Walter Adolph Gropius, a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus school (an art school operational from 1919 to 1933, which combined crafts and the fine arts). The city of Dessau commissioned Gropius to construct three pairs of identical semi-detached houses for the Bauhaus masters. The buildings take the form of interlocking cubic structures of various heights. Towards the street, the semi-detached houses are distinguished by generously glazed studios; vertical strip windows let light into the staircases and there are colourful accents on the window liners and the undersides of the balconies. The houses were built in a small pine-wood on the street, now known as the Ebertallee. The tooth-shaped buildings house the largest and finest Bauhaus collections of 20th-century design. In May 2014, the new Masters’ Houses Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were reconstructed and opened to the people by the Federal president, Joachim Gauck.