Gropius and his legendary group, shown on the roof of the Bauhaus Dessau building in 1926

There is a photograph in the collections of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris that all students of the Modernist movement will recognize. The year is 1926, and the place is Dessau, Germany. A man named Walter Gropius, who seven years earlier had founded an experimental school under the name "State Bauhaus," has just finished a new headquarters for his institution. Standing on the flat-tiled, Spartan roof of the building, a half-circle of bow-tied men (and one woman) represents what would become the quintessential twentieth-century art academy. In the center, holding a cigarette, is the dapper but stern-eyed Gropius himself. Surrounding him, with all the jollity of an organized crime family, are many of the other leaders of Germany's 1920s avant-garde: Breuer, Klee, Kandinsky, Bayer, Feininger, Albers, Moholy-Nagy. With the important later addition of Mies van der Rohe, who ran the Bauhaus in the three years before it was closed by the Nazis in 1933, these figures would exert an influence on architecture and the visual arts that is still felt today.

For anyone familiar with the image, the spectacle that took place on the same roof last September might have seemed like a strange parody. On an unusually clear afternoon--clear for a polluted, down-at-the-heels industrial town in former East Germany--an elegantly dressed man named Omar Akbar was serving Sekt (German sparkling wine) to about a dozen young artists, architects, planners, and social scientists. A cameraman from a local television station was there to record the event; the mood was light, but tinged with excitement. The occasion? None other than the launching of a new international Bauhaus.

Few of these men and women had much knowledge of what had happened here in the 1920s, and, with one or two exceptions, none had ever been to Dessau. (Among them was a sociology student from Freiberg who admitted he knew more about L.A. doom prophet Mike Davis than the educational innovations of Gropius.) Akbar himself is a strident critic of the old Bauhaus school, and Dessau is today a victim of poorly planned housing developments for the working class, the origins of which can be traced to the utopian ideas of the movement. In fact, the idea of bringing international-caliber architects to Dessau to lecture on visionary topics is, as one Berlin-based scholar of the subject put it recently, very hard to imagine.

Nevertheless, on that day, Akbar, who was born in Afghanistan and raised in West Germany, was confidently heralding a new "interdisciplinary and transcultural learning experience," one that would feature major innovators from all over the world. No degree is offered; participants are meant to be young professionals rather than students. The program's official language is English, and its scope is the full range of human, social, and applied sciences. As for the course of study, it is vaguely conceived as an open exploration of the developed and developing world. Like an advertisement for an exotic couture house, the institution's informational pamphlet reads "Dessau-Los Angeles-Shanghai-Cairo." And all of this is to take place in the quirky building where Gropius, Breuer, and others preached the Modernist gospel.

What does this quixotic project really represent?

Certainly, Akbar is not someone to be taken lightly. A professor of urban planning who has a long-standing relationship with the German government, the 51-year-old architect has an impressive resume of international development projects. As director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation since October 1998, he runs one of the three German institutions (the other two are the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin and the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar) devoted to the study of the buildings and works that were produced by the legendary school. Representing the three cities where the short-lived Bauhaus was located, these organizations (which are independent from one another) have gradually developed historical collections and exhibition programs on different aspects of the school's legacy.

So when Akbar set out last year to transform the Bauhaus Foundation from a small museum and regional institute into a splashy center for the international avant-garde, it signaled a call to arms in what had been a quiet world of researchers, collectors, and connoisseurs. Akbar's plans also met with stiff opposition from the local establishment. Not only was Akbar seeking to invent a new Bauhaus school that, while retaining the original's avant-garde spirit, rejected its Modernist dogma. He was also questioning the relevance of the foundation's previous work. The ambitious director, who is as critical of the Dessau regional government's bloated bureaucracy (inherited from the former East Germany) as he is of so-called Bauhaus Modernism, quickly drew fire for distancing the foundation from bread-and-butter development projects in the area. (For much of the 1990s, the foundation had devoted its resources to an initiative called the Industrial Garden Realm, a project that was designed to provide a stimulus for land re-use and economic growth in the rust-belt around Dessau.) "There are mayors in the neighboring cities of Saxony-Anhalt who are not speaking to me anymore," he says.

At the same time, a number of German art critics and Bauhaus specialists started asking whether Akbar's plans were pedagogically realistic, let alone politically viable. "It's not a design school. It doesn't have any of the same personalities," says Peter Hahn, the director of Berlin's Bauhaus-Archiv. "Who will be Gropius? Who will be Kandinsky?" Last August, Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, called Akbar "The Director as Troublemaker" in a two-page spread portraying him as an iconoclast and revisionist of the Bauhaus legacy. Thus began a battle over the soul of the early-twentieth-century institution--and what that institution means today.

The founding of the Bauhaus Kolleg, as Akbar's new school is officially called, comes at the height of a broad revival of interest in the Bauhaus. Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, Western scholars, architects, and aficionados of the Bauhaus were given, for the first time, full access to the buildings where the school was housed during its Weimar (1919-25) and Dessau (1925-32) periods. (The final Berlin period lasted only six months in 1932-33.) In Weimar, where the Bauhaus used arts schools that had been designed by Belgian Jugenstil architect Henry van de Velde in the first decade of this century, this has permitted a closer study of the institute's initial phase, leading up to the 1923 exhibition that first put the Bauhaus on the map. It has also provided a better understanding of the influence of the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, who brought both the austere lines and the bright chromatic effects of De Stijl to the Bauhaus in the same period.

Dessau, where the school moved after political pressure closed its Weimar base, has become a pilgrimage destination for those thrilled to be able to see the Gropius-designed building in the post-Cold War era. Before reunification, a small but well-entrenched campaign to restore and study the Bauhaus legacy had been under way in East Germany--the Dessau Bauhaus was added to the country's list of "significant monuments" in 1974. New attention from the West provided another, more powerful motive for the cities of Dessau and Weimar to play up their Bauhaus heritage.

In 1994, the small research center in Dessau that had taken care of the Bauhaus building there was given a new public charter and a new name, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. Its stated mandate was "to preserve, transmit, and study the legacy of the historic Bauhaus, as well as to contribute to solving the problems of designing today's environment." (Tellingly, preservation took precedence over solving contemporary problems.) In 1995, a modest but important collection of Bauhaus material belonging to the State Museum of Thuringia in Weimar was given its own building by the city, becoming the Bauhaus Museum. Then, in 1996, the University of Weimar, a state architecture and engineering school that had recently branched out into art and design, was rechristened the Bauhaus University. That same year, UNESCO designated the buildings used and designed by the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau as World Heritage Sites--an action that gave international support to expensive restoration projects now taking place in both towns.

The revitalization of the original Bauhaus buildings coincided with the emergence of new historical interpretations of the school. The conventional understanding of the Bauhaus in the West was profoundly shaped by the (self-serving) views that Gropius and Mies brought to the United States in the 1930s. In this oversimplified account, the Bauhaus was portrayed as a rigidly coherent, seamless aesthetic movement. It was presented both as a new kind of interdisciplinary education and as the originator of the so-called functionalist architecture that would be endlessly copied across the American landscape. (And, to some extent, in Europe: It was this sort of building that was "reintroduced" to West Germany in 1950s development.)

By the 1960s, Philip Johnson, who had once coined the phrase "International Style" to champion the Modernist idiom, was beginning to criticize its pervasiveness. In 1981, the hegemony of "Bauhaus style" was so complete that Tom Wolfe, in his vitriolic From Bauhaus to Our House, could blame it for stifling the development of a true American school of building.

The picture emerging now, however, is strikingly different. As some German scholars have long emphasized, the Bauhaus was not primarily a school of architecture. Mies's celebrated Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House, for example, preceded his entry into the Bauhaus. And the few buildings designed by its members, including George Muche's experimental Haus am Horn (1923) in Weimar and Gropius's Bauhaus Dessau building, were much more flawed than previously thought. (The "functionalist" window-mounted radiators on the latter are so ineffective that in winter, staff members wear long underwear and extra socks indoors.) As for art, design, and interior architecture, most of the Bauhaus output was characterized not by the production-line, black-and-white minimalism popularly associated with it, but rather by bright swatches of primary colors--some of which have resurfaced on the old walls of the Weimar and Dessau buildings--and largely aesthetic "pseudo-industrial" features: handcrafted chairs made with aluminum tubing; futuristic door handles; stainless steel tea sets that played on basic cylindrical forms but required painstaking hours of craft. In fact, aside from the little-studied directorship of the Swiss socialist Hannes Meyer (1928-30), who briefly turned the Bauhaus into a profit-making enterprise with more practical industrial products, the school was unsuccessful in mass-producing its designs.

In the midst of these revelations, new scholarship has shown the Bauhaus to have been a conflict-ridden organization that was as often marked by a cult-like atmosphere, infighting, and politics as by revolutionary teaching methods and great art. As Elaine Hochman, author of the recent Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, says, "There was a grave variance at all times between what the Bauhaus said and what it was doing--almost from one day to the next." A number of German historians, meanwhile, have argued that many of the innovations ascribed to the school actually originated elsewhere. "In America, the Bauhaus is still portrayed in isolation, as is all of Modernism," says Magdalena Droste, an art historian and former Bauhaus- Archiv scholar. "But a lot of what is still considered eBauhaus Style' came from the Dutch and from Le Corbusier."

All of which raises fundamental questions about what it means to reestablish an "authentic" Bauhaus today. Sitting in the room where Gropius once presided over his students, Omar Akbar is quick to tell you he holds no illusions about his larger-than-life predecessor. "Teamwork? Forget about teamwork. Gropius ran it as a dictatorship," he says. "Many conflicts and controversies were glossed over." As for the criticisms of "Bauhaus" Modernism, Akbar agrees that the version of the school exported by Gropius and Mies had a pernicious effect on cities around the world. "They destroyed the urban fabric," he says.

Despite Akbar's problems with Gropius's legacy, he felt that the contemporary Bauhaus Foundation represented a rare opportunity to create a new kind of avant-garde institution. Its previous directors, he believed, had mired the foundation in local concerns. As a professor of architecture and urban planning since 1993 at the Saxony-Anhalt School of Applied Sciences, which sits across the street from the Bauhaus in Dessau, he had firsthand experience of the foundation and its provincial orientation. "Before I came, it was completely involved in the region, in local politics," he says. The institution's primary accomplishments were the restoration of the Bauhaus building and the Industrial Garden Realm project for the industry-scarred landscape around Dessau. As for educational programming, the foundation had offered a children's workshop, training for amateur community artists, and the occasional Bauhaus symposium with outside scholars. "What did this have to do with the Bauhaus?" asks Akbar.

Noting the untapped potential of the Gropius building and the Bauhaus name, Akbar applied for the vacant directorship in 1998. He was the only one of six finalists who proposed going in a radically different direction. "I said, eThis doesn't work. You've got a piece of gold; you've got to use it,'" he recalls. His ambition to transform the place into an elite center of study for professionals in the fields of art, architecture, and design caught the attention of the foundation's board of trustees, who were eager to raise the institution's profile. As Akbar explains, he does not merely want to make the foundation recognized across Germany or even Western Europe. He intends to host seminars and lectures by the world's leading avant-garde architects, designers, and artists--people like Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, or even the video and installation artist Rebecca Horn. "I want to have the superstars of the next generation," he says, without a hint of exaggeration.

The idea of a Kolleg had emerged before Akbar's arrival, but not on the scale that the new director envisions. Previously, each of the 20-odd staff members had worked in one of three branches--Collection, Workshop, or Academy--and often on unrelated projects. As Akbar now planned it, the three branches would continue to exist in name, but would share tasks, with the Kolleg acting as a kind of central forum.

More jarring, however, was his desire to sideline the foundation's curatorial work and historical study. For Akbar, the material legacy of the 1920s--the lamps and chairs, furniture and buildings--is ancient history. "That is over," he says. "We have to look forward. We have new problems, a new context." With his development background, Akbar sees the decline of the urban environment and the lack of socially and aesthetically responsive planning as the most pressing problems in architecture today.

To an institution that prides itself on presenting the Dessau Bauhaus to today's public, Akbar's shift away from history and his no-holds-barred restructuring have seemed tantamount to high treason. How can such a carefully restored building, Bauhaus scholars ask, be converted into an as-yet-unproven teaching experiment? Along with the three master's duplexes and other structures built by the school, the main Bauhaus building now qualifies as the city's primary cultural attraction. Thus, the argument goes, the facility should devote itself to showing how the original school functioned in Dessau and explaining the current historical debates.

Akbar responds that the Dessau Bauhaus is not suited to be a museum. From its glass-curtain wall to its continuous air spaces and oddly shaped studios and workshops, the building was structured specifically as a working space, and it contains none of the features appropriate to an exhibition hall. More fundamentally, he argues, Gropius would never have wanted it to be a shrine to the past. "The Bauhaus was only one thing: a program," Akbar says. By reviving the building's original purpose as an avant-garde school of art and ideas, he feels he is coming closer to the original spirit of the Bauhaus than any historical re-creation of the 1920s workshop could. "We have a program and the name," he says. "This is what we can do, what we have to do, and what we will do."

Akbar has not pulled any punches in implementing his ideas. Since the foundation is state-funded and most of its employees have tenure for life, it will be several years before he can shape the staff entirely to his liking. Still, he has already been able to make some changes. "I had to get rid of some people; that was a bit of a problem," he says. "There is no room for the old mentalities here. They will leave, or adapt and take the opportunity to work with us."

Flamboyant and outspoken, Akbar seems at first glance a surprising choice to head an institution that depends to such a large extent on local and regional support. Born into a family of Kabul aristocrats close to the Afghani government and educated, from age 12, in Stuttgart, the West German economic powerhouse, Akbar does not mask his contempt for the provincial debates of still Ost-oriented Dessau. "[The politicians and the bureaucrats] have their way here, and sometimes they are not straight," he says. Despite a facility for bending the system to his own purposes, he finds it directly at odds with the clear-cut rules of market capitalism that he grew up with. "In the West, it's a different game. You win or you lose."

Akbar was always taught to win. Raised in a household frequented by scholars, intellectuals, and government ministers (his own father held cabinet posts in the 1960s), he quickly learned that the family name meant something and gained the self-confidence that would eventually help propel him to the heights of Germany's establishment. Meanwhile, he was nourished by the broad diet of Western literature and history that has distinguished him from more technically minded colleagues. (Later, when he taught his urban planning course at the Saxony-Anhalt University, he would tell his students at the beginning of the term to put away their textbooks and read Victor Hugo's descriptions of Paris. "There were too many course books and rules," he says. "I wanted vision and ideas. Sometimes, I would teach a class outside in the street, and passersby would join in. This was the kind of dynamic I was looking for.")

After his widowed father married a woman in Stuttgart, Akbar moved to the city, spending the rest of his adolescence in an entirely German environment. Following a brief stint in acting school, he went to Berlin to study architecture, where he became interested in social issues and development. He wrote a dissertation on urbanization in India and other areas of the third world. Soon he was working for the German government's international development agency, for which he led projects in such countries as Egypt, Yemen, and Gambia.

Despite having taught in Dessau for several years, Akbar's cosmopolitan background has cast him as something of a perpetual outsider in the inward-looking city. "I've had people refer to me as an Iranian, a Turk, an Arab--even when they know my true background," he says. Adding to this hostility is the sense that the Bauhaus Foundation itself is an over-subsidized island in a culturally vacuous city. Although Akbar keeps a small flat in Dessau for when he works late, he, like many on his staff, prefers to make the 90-minute commute from Berlin.

In contrast, Akbar has won strong political approval outside of Dessau for his project. He has been particularly adept at canvassing support from the state of Saxony-Anhalt, which alone supports the new Kolleg, and from the federal government, which funds 50 percent of the other branches of the foundation (the remaining 45 percent comes from the state, with 5 percent being contributed by the city). "He knows how to deal with people and money," says Henning Brunning, who is assisting Akbar in coordinating the Kolleg. These skills will become increasingly important in the coming years. The German state is gradually cutting back cultural funding across the board, and the $5 million-a-year foundation will have to rely increasingly on fund-raising and private sponsorship. Already, the Kolleg has been able to get funding for a number of scholarships to cover its modest tuition fee. All advanced study has traditionally been free in Germany, so financial aid is a crucial drawing card, even for practitioners currently earning money in the field.

It remains to be seen whether Akbar will have similar success in establishing an international reputation for the institute. As any architecture- and design-school administrator will tell you, it's not easy to launch a new institution in 1999 on any scale, let alone one of the caliber that Akbar is aiming for. "The problem in Dessau is that Dessau is no school," says Gerd Zimmermann, president of the more traditionally structured Bauhaus University in Weimar. "It's a cultural foundation. They get money from the state and from the federal government, but it is not a school."

The Bauhaus University, by contrast, is using its established position as a state architecture school to develop an international reputation under the Bauhaus banner. It has developed an innovative department of Gestaltung (art and design)--albeit within the parameters of a conventional degree program--and is beginning to network with other institutions in Europe and the United States. Although Zimmermann acknowledges that the Bauhaus name is above all a great marketing tool for the university, he also likes to think of it as a "metaphor for the modern bringing together of art and technology" that takes place there.

Nevertheless, the experimental quality of Akbar's Bauhaus Kolleg may give it the flexibility to become something that such rivals as the Bauhaus University cannot. Calling the Weimar school a conventional program to train professional architects, Akbar stresses the uniqueness of the Kolleg's approach. "Fortunately, in Germany we don't have any similar institutions with which to compete," he says. Unconstrained by a degree-oriented course of study or even by a specific set of disciplines, the Kolleg can adopt any number of creative ideas, approaches, and solutions to problems in the urban environment. By serving professionals rather than students, the Kolleg can structure itself as a research institute, which carries more prestige than a simple school. (Akbar also plans to create a biennial international prize to increase the foundation's stature abroad.) As a small program--Akbar sees its ideal enrollment as 25--it can offer a level of collaborative group activity, mobility, and engagement that gets lost at larger, more technically oriented institutions.

With the Kolleg in its inaugural academic year (there was an unofficial pilot program in the spring of 1999), Akbar still has a lot of questions to answer. For one, it remains to be seen what kind of results can emerge out of such a loosely defined program. This year's theme is "Sprawl," and the opening weeks of the first trimester were spent discussing approaches, talking to outside planners and architects, making individual excursions to nearby Leipzig--and also just determining what the Bauhaus means and what the Kolleg can do. John Powers, a Berlin-based American artist and one of two foreigners among the first 12 participants in Akbar's program (the other is an art historian from Belgrade), calls the Bauhaus "a global icon" and the program "a think tank of the twenty-first century." But when asked what about the Kolleg is specifically Bauhaus he says, "We're still working that out."

In the end, Akbar seems to be less intent on bringing about a revival of the Bauhaus than in carrying out its unfulfilled mythic goals: the great coming together of the disciplines; the breaking down of the master-student relationship; the union of art and technology; the creation of a utopian learning environment in which the living space is the working space and vice versa.

"What I want is to understand the views of artists in respect to certain questions, and sociologists in respect to the same questions, and so on," says Akbar, making it sound simple. "Bring together different points of view, figure out how to solve problems. That's what I want."

As the sun sets and Akbar's office grows dark, he pauses to turn on a light and looks contemplatively at the back wall. Despite his lack of patience for the historicists, he confesses that he hopes one day to reconstruct Gropius's studio--the Bauhaus "command center"--as it originally was. "But the problem is, there are no photographs," he says. "No one really knows what that side of the room looked like."