Tangible ideas: Architecture and the public at the 1931 German Building Exhibition in Berlin

The 1931 German Building Exhibition was a display of German production for a public and a professional audience. The three-month exhibition covered much ground physically and conceptually. In seventy buildings linked by twelve kilometers of streets, it showed off German progress in all sectors of building. Documentation of completed projects were accompanied by re-enactments of construction processes and full-scale displays of materials, structures, and buildings, located both in- and outdoors.As the director of the architecture section, Mies van der Rohe introduced the public to architecture with "The Dwellin of Our Time," a collection of full-scale housing units largely designed by members of the Werkbund. While the size of the units attested to their viability as real buildings, their interior location, design, and minimal reference to actual sites suggested that they were models, ideas rather than buildings. Public and professional reaction confirmed the ambiguous presentation of architecture at the exhibition Mies' general views on architecture at the time suggest something similar: that "The Dwelling of Our Time" illustrated building practice and a theory of a new way of life.A new approach to dwelling accompanied a new type of community, where the distinction between public and private was blurred. With Lilly Reich's Materials' show as its preface, the architecture section portrayed dwelling as an opportunity to sense one's surroundings not simply use them as shelter. Contemporary remarks by Mies suggest that he favored a direct connection between the physical and the metaphysical.As the site where the familiar would be transformed to be recognized, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, dwelling became one of many leisure sites where daily life was the subject of reflection for Weimar Germans. In the context of an exhibition of production, a presentation of dwelling as the site for developing a new perspective on daily routine might have also shed some light on the routine activities of the workplace, of German production. It seemed appropriate that practice and theory, habit and reflection, and the real and the ideal converged at an event that used production to present Germans to the world.