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Museum of Things

KREUZBERG

The Museum of Things, tucked inside an old factory, holds a treasury of everyday objects: a temple of the apparently mundane. It houses the archives of the Deutscher Werkbund: a federation of craftsmen, architects, designers and manufacturers formed in 1907 which, a decade before the more famous Bauhaus movement, advocated a union of design and industrial production to create attractive, replicable, quality goods that were accessible to a broad spectrum of society.

In the museum’s sleek, minimalist space, glass-fronted cabinets hold an orderly assortment of objects from these archives, as well as from everyday design culture, grouped by themes such as ‘yellow and black’ and ‘functional vs. kitsch’, rather than by era, to provide them with new contexts. The workaday objects you’ll find run the gamut from silver spoons to hair dryers, Star Wars collectibles to GDR-era toiletries.

The thousands of objects on display have been selected to exemplify material culture from the early 20th century up to the present. The tidy assemblage, like a well-controlled yard sale, can be enjoyed for its sheer profusion of strange stuff – schlock like slippers made to look like penises and a decorative pillow embroidered with Hitler’s visage. It can also be browsed as a history of influence, illustrating how the Werkbund’s cardinal principles came to dominate German industrial design. Particularly impressive is the ’20s-era Frankfurt Kitchen: this compact contraption, whose cupboards disappear inside one another and whose countertops fold down to reveal appliances, is a space-saving marvel, a triumph of the federation’s credo, ‘function without ornament’.

The section on elektronische Dinge (electronic things) brings visitors up to the present for a look at function and design in today’s gadgets (laptops, mobile phones) – and shows how the Werkbund’s ideas about form, materials, production and accessibility presaged the evolution of the MacBook well before Steve Jobs ever wielded a laser pointer. TE

Oranienstr. 25, 10999; U Kottbusser Tor; www.museumderdinge.de

Map: East E3