life objects, and also values such as the appreciation of quality, materiality, good proportion, functionality and longevity. The aesthetic understanding of good taste and good design, for the Werkbund , was as much about being confronted by bad design and bad taste. The Werkbund was dissolved 1934 by the National-Socialists, along with its institutional product, the Bauhaus . Reinstated in 1950, again assembling architecture, urbanism, design and crafts, the Werkbund introduced the aesthetic of ‘good’ design to education: Werkbundkisten ( Werkbund boxes), given to pupils, showed thematised household products that were supposed to be held and arranged by the pupils themselves. The names of the designers and the production dates were absent. Such tools civilised good behaviour in the developing consumer society by favouring good design and good form as an ideal taste of post-war Germany. Today the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge has about 35,000 documents and 20,000 objects. It has collected high-quality designs from Werkbund or Bauhaus personalities and products from companies that joined the organisation, reflecting on the developed quality of mass-produced objects. It also examines the Werkbund in daily-life, contrasting elements of good ( Werkbund ) design alongside no-name or anonymous objects, hand-made objects, kitsch or trash products. Finally, it defines itself as ‘the museum of mass-produced objects from the twentieth century’. The Museum der Dinge demonstrated ingenious installations in previous exhibitions at the Martin-Gropius-Bau , situating a distinguished branding within Berlin’s museum tradition. Far from art-historical museums that proffer creator and date of
production tracing the product within a particular art-historical period, the Museum der Dinge follows thematic relations that are often disconcerting, focussing on the accumulation of objects instead of on the admiration of a single one. It plays with objects from an industrial context with everyday functions in the museum context, pushing unspectacular products into aesthetic displays, and realised installations. The chosen displays in the new museum location, representing only a small portion of the entire collection, separate themselves from usual curatorial strategies and focus on the accumulation of things, displayed in an un-aesthetic manner in huge wooden cabinets. * Displays in the narrow and lengthy space of the Museum der Dinge divide into several thematic parts: related methods or organisations, relations or correlations; objects connected directly with the history of the Werkbund and the status of commodities and produced goods in twentieth century German society; those which densely group assorted objects together based on a loose thematic typologies such as body-forms, nature, etc.); and temporary exhibitions and installations. For the first time visitor, it is often difficult to grasp the distinctions between different display zones, although after a slow wander amongst the museum’s claustrophobic arrangement of tall wood and glass cases, you do start to detect shifts in curatorial styles as deliberate rather than accidental. Objects representative of the historical discourses in Germany surrounding materiality and design, of which the Werkbund was a major contributor, range from crockery to furniture
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archives and museums: On Site review 20
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