Bauhaus Museum Weimar
About This Site
The world's oldest museum collection of Bauhaus workshop work, in a building that is younger than most of its visitors.
A collection older than the museum
It exists because Walter Gropius began setting workshop pieces aside in the 1920s, while the school was still running — the Klassik Stiftung calls it the world's oldest museum collection of Bauhaus workshop work, and it has grown to some 13,000 objects. Gropius picked more than 160 top pieces for the museum out of several thousand things the workshops had made. That is an unusual provenance: most museums collect a movement once it is over, and this one was begun by the man who was running it.
The pieces people come for
They are the small ones. The table lamp by Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl Jakob Jucker, Marianne Brandt's teapot, Marcel Breuer's slatted chair, furniture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, work by Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger. Objects designed to be manufactured now sit in vitrines a century later — everyday things elevated into museum pieces.
Arranged by question, not by year
The permanent exhibition is called "The Bauhaus Comes from Weimar" and it is built around the school's questions rather than its chronology: how we should live, what an everyday object ought to cost and look like, who design is for. It is a better fit for the material than a timeline would be, because the workshops were arguing about those questions rather than progressing through phases.
The building
The Klassik Stiftung opened the museum in April 2019, for the centenary of the school's founding — a deliberately plain block on the Stéphane-Hessel-Platz. Its argument is that the Bauhaus is not a style to admire but a set of questions that were asked here first.
Connected Historical Figures
architect • founder and director of the Bauhaus • teacher
He began the collection in the 1920s, while he was still directing the school it came from.
furniture designer • architect • Bauhaus student, then master
His lattice chair is one of the pieces the museum is known for.
painter • Bauhaus master • teacher
Work by Klee is in the collection, from his years teaching in the Weimar school.
painter • printmaker • Bauhaus master
Work by Feininger is in the collection, from the school's Weimar years.
designer • metalworker • photographer
Her teapot is one of the pieces the museum's own account of the collection names.
designer • silversmith • industrial designer
The table lamp he and Carl Jacob Jucker made in 1924 is here — the object most people picture when they hear the word Bauhaus.
artist • photographer • Bauhaus master
Work by Moholy-Nagy is in the collection; he ran the metal workshop much of this metalwork came out of.
Visit Information
€11 adults; €8 reduced; €4 students aged 16–20
Summer: Wed–Mon 09:30–18:00; winter: Mon and Wed–Fri 11:00–17:00, Sat–Sun 10:00–18:00; closed Tuesdays
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1, 99423 Weimar
50.9850, 11.3245
Stay and eat nearby
Where to stay
Goetheplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
The Bauhaus Museum is at Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1; the hotel is on the Goetheplatz.
Goetheplatz 6, 99423 Weimar
Across the Weimarhallenpark from the hostel's square.
Kurt-Nehrling-Straße 50, 99423 Weimar
The house names the new Bauhaus Museum among the things it is near.
Where to eat
Rollplatz 8a, Weimar
One of the two landmarks the house names to place its own square.
Events held here
Events
Fridays and Saturdays at 14:00, and Wednesdays too from 21 March to 1 November
Holds the collection the walk describes; the buildings and the objects are best taken together.
Spring into summer, at the Bauhaus Museum
The house that showed it — and the obvious place for an argument about how the Bauhaus is looked at.
One Saturday night in May, 18:00 to midnight
The modern end of a night that otherwise belongs to the classical houses — and a place on the route with no eighteenth century in it.
In Weimar's history
Historic sites
The plain cube of 2019 that closes the timeline.
Am Horn 61, 99425 Weimar
The furnishings that made the 1923 model house are the kind of workshop work this collection holds.
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, 99423 Weimar
The school in whose workshops all of it was made.
Historical periods
The museum of the period: the workshop output of the Weimar Bauhaus, kept together since the 1920s.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 and voted out by 1925 — time enough to change what a design school is, and not enough for the town that made it to keep it.
Stages and venues
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1, 99423 Weimar