Objects Exhibitions Spaces A Museum History

The Werkbund Archive—Museum of Things is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The museum’s focus in on a culture of design characterized by industrial mass production. Building on the work of the Deutscher Werkbund, it collects and exhibits objects that were designed, produced, bought and sold, used, disposed or rendered superfluous in everyday life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unlike classic design museums, the Museum of Things embeds the history of the Deutscher Werkbund in an exploration of mundane consumer culture. It connects the objects in the collection to one of modernism’s core concerns: the relationship between art and life. In this richly illustrated publication, museum theorists and scholars of art and culture look back at the Werkbund Archive’s fifty-year history and at the museum’s view of itself, which is shaped by the politicization of the 1970s and a concept of history that is geared to everyday life.