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brilliant grey - herbert hirche's centenary  | | The Green Shell Chair, 1957, for Walter Knoll, re-edition 2010 Richard Lampert, photo: Richard Becker, © Richard Lampert | May 21 - October 25, 2010
The
exhibition presents Herbert Hirche's inheritance and celebrates the
architect, furniture and product designer as one of the most
significant Werkbund stylists of the
German post-war period.
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A Museum Of Things Since summer 2007 the museum shows a significant part of its large and rarely exhibited collection of design and everyday culture of the 20th century in an "Open Storage" presentation. On the one hand the objects are arranged in a display of exemplary objects and supply information about the polarizing program of the Deutscher Werkbund and on the other hand give basic information about function, using-history in the 20th century and contemporary product culture. The objects face a very controversial constellation: objects designed by famous artists are confronted with anonymous design, functional and puristic objects are placed besides "bad taste" or "Kitsch" while substantially "honest" things encounter surrogates, branded articles face no-name products. This museum laboratory aims at directing the visitor’s attention - starting from today’s product culture - to visualize and re-experience 20th century’s history of things.
New in the permanent exhibition: the "Frankfurt Kitchen" The "Frankfurt Kitchen" is an important document of cultural history for
the transfer of industrial, rationalized work processes to the sphere
of the private household. This is a central characteristic of modern
architecture and everyday culture in the 1920s. The Viennese
architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the kitchen in 1926 as a
standard prototype. Some 10,000 such kitchens were realized in numerous
variants in the Frankfurt estates. The development of a
standardized modular system made it possible to reduce the floor area
required, and also permitted mass production which lowered costs
further. The "Frankfurt Kitchen" was widely marketed and became the
model for the fitted kitchen of today. The
"Frankfurt Kitchen" specimen in the display collection of the
Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge was taken from a two-family terrace
house at Heidenfeld 24 in the Römerstadt estate, built in 1927-28. The ensemble is an ideal addition to
the Museum's collection because the "Frankfurter Kitchen" illustrates key
principles of the 1920s: objectivity, functionalism, and above all
standardization. The
"Frankfurt Kitchen" was one of the models propagated by the Werkbund and
the Bauhaus for the "New Life" of the "New Man", an idea that was widely
popular in the 1920s.
Alongside
the actual kitchen exhibited in the museum, visitors can examine an
audiovisual installation based on historic photos and films, a 1985
interview with the designing architect, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and
the findings of two researchers who spent years studying the "Frankfurt
Kitchen".
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Herbert Hirche's student ID at the Bauhaus
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