ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues the ways in which the Werkbund Exhibition signified a shift away from the formal representation of objects and towards their use in the aesthetic staging of material sensations and experiences. Germany's participation in the 1930 Werkbund Exhibition signaled a positive development in the re-establishment of Franco-German relations, which had been severely affected by the traumatic events of World War I. In its aftermath, France had not extended invitations to Germany for previous exhibitions and thus Germany's participation under the organizational leadership of Walter Gropius and the Werkbund elicited high expectations on all sides. Material logic and material imagination emerged as the driving forces behind the curatorial concepts of the exhibition if in distinct ways: part of the exhibition pictured materials as the key to modern design, which, as Gropius proposed, was no longer based on the external addition of decorative ornamentation and profile but on the interrelations between material, mass, and color.
