Abstract

Bauspiel: ein Schiff by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher is one of the most important toys of the twentieth century, designed and built in 1923 when the designer was part of the Bauhaus Woodcarving Workshop. Having become an icon of an entire era, a symbol of a design utopia, Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauspiel remains an object that makes us wonder not only for the fascination it emanates, its perennial aesthetic relevance that still legitimates its production and marketing up until nowadays, but for the strength of its evidencing and its ability to force us questioning ourselves about who a child is, and therefore, obviously about who the man is. Mimesis, game, toy thus become the dimensions that Bauspiel manifests to the highest degree, in which anthropological questioning and aesthetic analysis are intertwined in the same research.