Benita Koch-Otte
Benita Koch-Otte’s playful designs inspired our latest print Benita, part of our limited-edition collection celebrating the women of Bauhaus.
Benita Koch-Otte, taken by her husband in the late 1920s.
Benita Koch-Otte was celebrated as one of the most accomplished weavers of the Bauhaus – the inspiration behind our latest limited-edition collection Women of Bauhaus. Our new print Benita pays homage to her joyous, playful work and can be found across our papers…
Benita Koch-Otte, Draft in green-violet, 1920s. Courtesy of artnet.
Benita Koch-Otte had previously taught drawing, physical education and handicraft at the Municipal Secondary School for Girls in Uerdingen, before deciding to enrol in the Bauhaus in 1920 to further her studies. There she joined the weaving workshop, producing bright geometric designs for carpets, curtains and wall hangings.
A natural innovator, Koch-Otte experimented with different weaving techniques to produce vibrant and hardwearing designs. Together with Gunta Stölzl, she attended supplementary classes at the Dyeing Technical School and Textile Technical School in Krefeld to learn new production methods and share these with her classmates at the Bauhaus.
Benita Koch-Otte - Woven Wall Hanging, 1923–1924. Courtesy of MoMA.
Taking inspiration from Koch-Otte’s combinations of spots and stripes, we designed our new print Benita to replicate the playful energy of her designs. Benita can be found in four different colourways designed to reflect the balanced palettes of her textiles.
Alongside her textile designs Koche-Otte experimented with other disciplines, the most notable example of which was her design for the kitchen of the Haus am Horn in Weimar. The domestic house was designed by Bauhaus Master Georg Muche and exemplified the Bauhaus design principle of matching form with function.
Kitchen of Haus am Horn, designed 1923. Courtesy of Sailko.
Koch-Otte’s kitchen design was the primary inspiration for the later Frankfurt Kitchen – a milestone in domestic architecture for its focus on creating a low-cost design that, despite space constraints, was both aesthetically pleasing and allowed users to work efficiently.
The Frankfurt Kitchen, 1926
In 1925, Koch-Otte left the Bauhaus to take up a new role as director of the weaving workshop at the State-Municipal School of Applied Arts at Burg Giebichenstein. However, due to the increasing Nazi presence Koch-Otte and her other colleagues were considered too avant-garde and were dismissed in 1933.
Koch-Otte and her husband, fellow Bauhaus student Heinrich Koch, then moved to Prague, but after he died in an accident in 1934 Benita returned to Germany. She got a job at a psychiatric hospital in Bielefeld where she ran a weaving workshop for the patients, working there until her retirement in 1957.