artist, furniture and product designer, born 1899, died 1944

 

When the Bauhaus was preparing its model home “Am Horn ” in Weimar in 1923, a children’s room was part of the plan. Entrusted with its conception and furnishings was student Alma Buscher, a designer whose career directly reflects the interconnection between the reform movement before the First World War and the Bauhaus. After completing her secondary school degree and attending a “women’s school”, she began in 1917 a three-year program of studies at the Reimann Art Academy in Berlin, an institute founded on the principle of reform education which also co-operated with the Deutscher Werkbund. The fact that, after another two-year course at the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts), Buscher then took up yet another study program at the Bauhaus can only be explained by the institute’s extraord i n a ry magnetism, to which the impassioned arts enthusiast was only too susceptible. Here she found the vocation that would dominate her short life. Although there had already been individual instances of modern design in children’s rooms and furn i t u re during the Werkstätten movement, e.g. by Josef Hoffmann, Buscher’s concept represented the first radical attempt to develop entirely new, child-friendly furn i t u re types. Her changing table, the child’s bed based on a connector system, the rolling ladder chair and the toy cabinet created a “prepared environment” for creative play as advocated for example by the Montessori schools. The design was also innovative in its overall coherence. In the toy cabinet, which included shelves, a puppet theatre, a mobile toy chest and stackable cube-shaped boxes, the idea of a modular furn i t u re program – something that Marcel Breuer was also working on at the time – was already immanent. One of her basic ideas was that all furn i t u re should be movable and conceived for both building and playing. Buscher also developed toys, including cut-out sheets, building block systems, an abstract puppet theatre and so-called“ throwing dolls” (dolls with unbreakable heads), for which she registered a patent. Her pieces were among the few commercial products of the Bauhaus, even though the revenues were quite modest. After she left the Bauhaus, her ideas were not pursued further there. She herself was only able to work sporadically due to the changing engagements of her husband, a dancer and actor. Shortly before the end of the Second World War, Alma Buscher lost her life in a bombing attack.