In 1922 Georg Muche, then the Form Master of the Bauhaus weaving workshop, produced the design for a 65-square-metre experimental single-family house. Construction preparations began in February 1923; the house was built spring through summer of that year on a plot at Am Horn 61 in Weimar, on land leased from the state of Thuringia with a view to developing a full Bauhaus settlement. Adolf Meyer, who managed the architectural operations of Gropius’s private practice, oversaw construction in coordination with the Bauhaus architecture department.
The house served as the central architectural exhibit for the Bauhaus Exhibition of July–September 1923, which opened under the slogan “Art and Technology: A New Unity.” It was the first project the school had taken from program to built structure under its own direction. All Weimar workshops contributed to the interior: Marcel Breuer furnished it through the carpentry workshop, Marianne Brandt supplied the lighting from the metal workshop, Gunta Stölzl provided textiles from the weaving workshop, and Oskar Schlemmer painted the walls. The house demonstrated the Bauhaus claim that workshops could converge on a single domestic environment — not a sequence of independent objects, but an integrated habitat.
The exhibition drew approximately 15,000 visitors and received mixed responses, with progressive support alongside conservative criticism in the Weimar press. The house was demolished after the exhibition. It had been partly funded by the Berlin industrialist Adolf Sommerfeld and was never built as a permanent structure; the funding shortfall that followed ended the proposed Bauhaus settlement before a second house was started. What survived was the documentation — drawings, photographs, and workshop records — of the school’s first attempt to test its workshop pedagogy against a real building at real scale.