Glass | Concrete | Metal

At the beginning of the twentieth century, glass as a construction material become one of the most important media for a new view of architecture. “Glass architecture”, Walter Gropius wrote in 1926, reveals “a changed perception of space that reflects the principle of movement, of our era’s traffic in a loosening of building volumes and spaces that negates the terminating wall and seeks to preserve the connection of the interior to the surroundings.” Turned into a transparent material by subjecting mineral solids to heat, glass is the stuff of artificial transformation – and thus also embodies the very upheavals of the modern era.
The first section of the exhibition examines the technological, aesthetic, and symbolic dimensions of this material that rethought architecture and changed our view of the world.

The basic structure of the Bauhaus Building is a reinforced-concrete load-bearing structure. The second section focuses on what it meant when the Bauhaus was being built in 1925/26 to realise such a construction and what assumptions, general conditions, and processes were associated with it.

Concrete made new architectural freedoms and constructions possible. At the same time, the exhibition addresses the considerable interventions in the landscape and ecosystems that went along with extracting raw materials for the production of concrete – both then and now. The equivocality of this building material between innovation and ecological contamination becomes just as obvious as its central role for modernity.

In the teaching at and products from the metal workshop, in the designs for the Steel House, and with Tanz in Metall (Dance in Metal) on the Bauhaus Stage, a new, utopian will to design unfolded as well as an orientation around the industrial product. This enthusiasm extended to others’ experiments with technology like those of the Junkers factory in Dessau.

Steel and aluminium became the preferred metals at the Bauhaus because it was now primarily concerned with designing lamps and metal furniture in keeping with the Bauhaus architecture projects. But the third section of the exhibition also shows that extracting and processing metals represented intensive exploitation of natural resources and human labour – aspects that have long been overlooked in the history of the reception of the Bauhaus.