Qualla: Haus am Horn

Haus am Horn: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0. The budget was 100 million marks. Within a year the house had cost 650 million, and neither figure meant very much, because this was Germany in 1923 and the currency was coming apart faster than the mortar could set. The Haus am Horn went up in four months on a plot in Weimar that had until recently been the vegetable garden supplying the Bauhaus canteen. A Berlin industrialist paid for it. A painter designed it. An architecture office belonging to the school's own director built it, because the school did not yet have an architecture department of its own. It was the first building anywhere constructed on Bauhaus principles, it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1996, and it is a small square house that a great many people walk straight past.

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Image: sailko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haus am Horn: A Square Wrapped Around a Room

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0. Georg Muche, who taught at the Bauhaus and was a painter rather than an architect, produced the design; Adolf Meyer and Walter March from Walter Gropius's practice turned it into something buildable. The logic is a single central living room lit from above through a raised cleres...

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Image: sailko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haus am Horn: The Kitchen That Became Every Kitchen

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0. Benita Koch-Otte designed the kitchen and Erich Brendel built it: continuous work surfaces, fitted storage, everything placed around the sequence of actually cooking rather than around whatever furniture a household happened to own. Three years later Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky dr...

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Image: sailko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haus am Horn: The Toy Cupboard Problem

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oskar Schlemmer, CC0. Alma Siedhoff-Buscher designed the children's room: the furniture, and a multi-functional toy cupboard whose components came apart to be built into other things. Reviews of the house during the 1923 exhibition were mixed, but visitors were entirely clear about what they liked bes...

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Image: Oskar Schlemmer | CC0

Haus am Horn: The Owners

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0. The house stood empty until September 1924, when it was sold to a lawyer named Franz Kühn. He engaged the architect Ernst Flemming, and between 1926 and 1933 the pure square acquired a verandah, an extended living room and children's room, an extra room on the western corner and ...

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Image: FrDr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Haus am Horn: Undoing Eighty Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0. For the Bauhaus centenary the house closed in 2018 for a restoration costing 838,000 euros: additions stripped away, lost elements reconstructed, the 1923 colours put back on the walls. Most of the original furniture had scattered over the decades. The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation s...

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Image: sailko | CC BY-SA 3.0