Haus Am Horn
About This Site
The only building the Bauhaus ever realised in Weimar, put up in four months for a single exhibition and furnished by every workshop in the school.
Four months, one exhibition, 1923
The painter Georg Muche, the school's youngest master, drew the plans; Walter Gropius's building office ran the site; the Berlin contractor Adolf Sommerfeld paid for it. The house opened in the summer of 1923 as the centrepiece of the school's first large public exhibition — a single-storey family house at Am Horn, finished in four months, and the only one of the Bauhaus's Weimar arguments that anyone could walk into.
A laboratory that was also a shop window
It was two things at once: a test of materials and techniques nobody had lived with yet, and an advertisement for them. What still surprises visitors is who made it. The joinery, the weaving, the metal shop and the wall painting were not decorating an architect's building; they were the building's argument — that a chair, a lamp, a kitchen and a wall are one problem — and they had to prove it at full size in front of paying visitors.
A house people simply lived in, 1923–2019
Sommerfeld bought the furnished house at the end of 1923, and its contents were probably lost in the Second World War. A private owner added a veranda and extra rooms in 1924; the city held it from 1951 at the latest until 1998 and let it to a succession of tenants; the Bauhaus-Universität's Circle of Friends then leased and restored it, taking the later additions off again. In 2019 the city transferred it to the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
What you see now
Every room of the one-storey house is open, refurnished with reconstructions, so the plan can be walked rather than read about — which matters, because the plan is the point. Together with van de Velde's two school buildings in the town centre it carries the UNESCO World Heritage listing "Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau".
Questions visitors ask
- What is Haus Am Horn?
- The only building the Bauhaus ever realised in Weimar — a single-storey family house put up in four months as the centrepiece of the school's first large public exhibition in 1923, furnished by every workshop the school had.
- Who built it?
- Georg Muche, the school's youngest master, drew the plans; Walter Gropius's building office ran the site; the Berlin contractor Adolf Sommerfeld paid for it.
- Can I visit?
- Every room is open, refurnished with reconstructions so the plan can be walked rather than read about. Wednesday to Monday, 10:00–18:00, closed Tuesdays and closed in winter.
- Is it part of a World Heritage Site?
- Yes — together with van de Velde's two school buildings in the town centre, it carries the UNESCO World Heritage listing "Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau".
Connected Historical Figures
architect • master of architecture at the Bauhaus • teacher
He co-directed the construction of the model house and edited the 1924 book about it.
designer • cabinetmaker • toy designer
She designed the children's room in the model house — the only room in it made for someone who cannot reach the door handle.
painter • Bauhaus master • head of the weaving workshop
He drew it — the only building the Bauhaus realised in Weimar.
architect • founder and director of the Bauhaus • teacher
His building office ran the construction and he staged the 1923 exhibition the house was built for.
Visit Information
€7 adults; €5 reduced; €2 students aged 16–20
Wed–Mon 10:00–18:00; closed Tuesdays; closed in winter
Am Horn 61, 99425 Weimar
50.9739, 11.3394
Events held here
Events
Fridays and Saturdays at 14:00, and Wednesdays too from 21 March to 1 November
The only building the Bauhaus finished in Weimar — the far point of the longer walk.
Spring into summer, at the Bauhaus Museum
Weimar's own entry on the World Heritage list, and one of the buildings the exhibition photographed then and now.
One day in June
The one Weimar property outside the classical ensemble: the Haus am Horn belongs to the Bauhaus inscription, and the day covers both.
In Weimar's history
Historic sites
The Bauhaus's one built manifesto in Weimar, the model house of 1923.
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1, 99423 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 that built it: the exhibition ran in its two van de Velde buildings and out here at the same time.
Historical periods
The only realised architecture of the Weimar Bauhaus, and the period's clearest surviving argument.
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.
In Weimar's history
The weeks in which the Bauhaus put itself in front of the public for the first time, in three buildings and one house it had to build first.
Built for it, in four months, as its centrepiece.
Twice in three years the World Heritage Committee put Weimar on its list: the Bauhaus buildings on 7 December 1996, and the eleven monuments of Classical Weimar on 2 December 1998.
Muche's model house of 1923, the only Bauhaus building realised in Weimar, listed with the schools in 1996.