“Future’s Cell”. German Building Exhibitions from 1927 to 1957

• Applicant: Dr. Regine Heß
• Subject Area: Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology ; Art History
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 260959582

The proposed project addresses the research gap in discussion of German Building Exhibitions, benefitting from preliminary work in archival research, analysis of sources and conceptualisation. It employs a methodological approach that incorporates discourse analysis, architectural sociology, actor network theory and contemporary history.Building exhibitions like Weissenhofausstellung at Stuttgart in 1927, “Schaffendes Volk” at Dusseldorf in 1937, and Interbau at West Berlin in 1957 have become mass events providing unique venues for experimenting with various curatorial practices and design strategies. With up to some 7 million visitors at Dusseldorf, new construction methods, scientific findings as well as architectural and cultural propaganda and concepts of habitation were afforded a broad forum for public discussion. These building exhibitions have demonstrated ways of individual lifestyle and collective cohabitation under different policies.German architectural historiography has often researched them as separated, and not evolutionary, units. In focusing only on their buildings and in disregarding hall shows, fairs, public programs, conferences, luna parks and gardens, the field architecture history has tended to overlook building exhibitions as an example for modern heterotopy. In their accompanying discourse about life and social models thus lies a fertile area for analysis of the contested pluralism of modernity between 1927 and 1957.The proposed project sets three goals: (1) Not only to exploit the potential that building exhibitions offer in demonstrating innovations in building and living but to interrogate their vision of ideal communities in microcosm. (2) To offer a synchronic analysis of how exhibition organisers instrumentalised the housing problem as a tool for understanding the “changed material, social, and intellectual structures of our time” and how they implemented it to articulate “the struggle for new ways of living” in building exhibition architecture, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe puts it in 1927. (3) This adumbrates the third objective of the project: to investigate the transformation of socio-political structures that occurred between 1927 and 1957, and how this affected and was reflected in the selection of construction types, exhibits, concepts, style of decoration as well as the actors involved in building exhibitions. To this end, textual sources pertaining to other actors are drawn on, i.e. not directly from the profession of architecture as such. These actors include, among others, politicians, entrepreneurs, sociologists, designers, artists, and publicists. By inclusion of these inter- and extra-disciplinary perspectives, the project will thus not only serve to redress the long neglect of building exhibitions as a crucial exemplar of how building design and visions of contemporary living in the 20th century have emerged, but enrich the understanding of the multiple influences involved.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland