Bauhaus Museum Weimar
Museum Store

With the opening of the Bauhaus Museum Weimar on 05/04/2019, the world’s oldest Bauhaus collection received a new place for exhibition, discourse, and public engagement with questions of design, society, and everyday life. One hundred years after the founding of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, the building does not close off the historical positions of the Bauhaus as a museum, but translates them into contemporary questions.

Felix Schwake was commissioned to design the museum store. The starting point of the project was the question of how a retail space within a museum can be designed without competing with the architecture or the collection. The space was required to present products while maintaining the necessary calmness and clarity appropriate to the institutional context.

The design therefore follows a reduced spatial order. Form, materiality, and function were developed so that the space does not operate through decorative means, but through proportion, structure, and atmosphere. The principle that “architecture must serve as a background for life” was not understood as a stylistic formula, but as an attempt to bring use, orientation, and perception into a calm balance.

In collaboration with Mr. von Keyserlingk, a flexible display system was developed that can respond to changing products and varying presentation situations. The spatial structure remains deliberately restrained and open. The focus is not on the furniture itself, but on the ability to present content and objects in a precise and concentrated manner.

The project directly connects to questions already raised by the historic Bauhaus: How can function, construction, material, and everyday life be integrated? What responsibility does design carry toward daily use? And how can reduction lead to spatial clarity without losing atmosphere?

The museum store is therefore not understood as a decorated retail space, but as part of a larger architectural attitude in which design operates through permanence, precision, and deliberate restraint.

Bauhaus Museum Weimar
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1
99423 Weimar
Germany