Siedhoff-Buscher was among the first batch of students at the illustrious Bauhaus School and she focused mainly on children's design. In 1923, she designed a children's room that is particularly notable for the multifunctionality of the objects. For example, the changing table can turn into a writing table and the dresser becomes a puppet show with its carved window. “Children need a space where they can be who they want to be. Everything is theirs — their imagination shapes it,” Siedhoff-Buscher wrote about her nursery.

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Still on sale

Siedhoff-Buscher also designed toys, such as her Wurfpuppen. These were light, soft but durable woven dolls that could be tossed around or thrown into the air and then landed gracefully. But her best-known work is probably the Schiffbauspiel, which is still being sold. It consists of solid wooden blocks that together form a sailboat. She published two books with cutout patterns for making a sailboat and a crane, in 1927 and 1930, respectively. Siedhoff-Buscher saw toys as “not something finished — as offered by those luxury stores”, but as tools with which and through which “the child develops and always keeps looking”.

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Beautiful in simplicity

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius didn't like her work: “What she did is little,” he said about her work. For Gropius, her work embodied his fear that the Bauhaus would be categorized as an ordinary arts and crafts school. Siedhoff-Buschers was deeply moved by Gropius' assessment of her work and retired from school in the fall of 1927. In the following years, Siedhoff-Buscher lived a reclusive life due to depression. Not much later, she died at the age of 44 when she was hit by a bombing in the Second World War. Her toys live on, unpretentious and beautiful in all their simplicity: “They want to be nothing — no cubism, no expressionism, just a fun play of colors of smooth and angular shapes according to the old building kits,” Siedhoff-Buscher said about it.