Into the Carpentry Workshop
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher entered the Bauhaus Weimar in April 1922 after training at design schools in Berlin. After the preliminary course, she was placed in the weaving workshop — the destination the school’s institutional culture assigned to most women. She did not stay. By 1923 she had made the case, with support from Georg Muche and others, that her proposed designs for children’s toys and furniture were suited to industrial serial production and required the tools and materials of the wood-sculpture and carpentry workshop. The argument was practical: the work she was proposing could not be made in weaving.
The transfer was unusual. The carpentry workshop, led by Form Master Josef Hartwig, was almost exclusively male. Siedhoff-Buscher’s move into it was an individual negotiation of a structural constraint, not a policy change.
The Haus am Horn
In 1923 she was commissioned to design the complete children’s room for the Haus am Horn — the experimental model house Georg Muche designed for the school’s first major public exhibition in Weimar. Her brief was a room scaled to a child, functional for a child’s actual daily life, and demonstrating how Bauhaus principles could reach domestic design at its smallest scale.
What she produced was a suite of multifunctional furniture: a changing unit that could convert to a desk, a crib designed to grow with a child into a teenage bed, a toy cupboard whose door opened out to become a puppet theatre stage, and a ladder that also functioned as a chair, a bench, and a storage unit. The pieces were white and washable. Each was designed to serve multiple purposes rather than a single function. The room demonstrated the same formal logic — geometric clarity, material honesty, purpose over ornament — that the rest of the school’s workshops were applying to chairs and lamps and textiles.
The Ship Building Game
Alongside the furniture, Siedhoff-Buscher designed the Schiffbauspiel — the Ship Building Game — in two versions: a small set of 22 geometric blocks and a large set of 39. The blocks were primary-coloured and non-prescriptive: they could be arranged in many ways without producing a predetermined result. This was a design argument about children’s play — that open-ended building develops more creative thinking than toys with fixed outcomes. The same geometric vocabulary that structured Bauhaus form exercises appeared here as objects a child could pick up and recombine.
The children’s room and its toys were among the most positively received elements of the 1923 exhibition. The Zeiss kindergarten in Jena later adopted the furniture. The Schiffbauspiel is still reproduced today by manufacturers including Naef. Siedhoff-Buscher continued at the Bauhaus through the Dessau move but stepped away from design work around 1926–1927 after marriage and the birth of her children. The room she made in Weimar in 1923 remains one of the most complete demonstrations of Bauhaus principles applied to the everyday world — not to a prestige object or a building, but to a child’s room.