2017
Archives Museum, Ulm University of Art and Design
The exhibition design traces the brief history of the famous design school founded after World War II. The narrative is structured around the tension between the postwar “zero hour,” the development of German industry in the 1960s, and the final decision not to continue the experiment—at a time when design was beginning to grapple with the difficult issue of overconsumption. The museum is located in the former wood, plaster, and metal workshops of this school, which was designed in the 1950s by the artist and architect Max Bill. Thus, the exhibition invites visitors to discover the history of the site and also presents the context of the postwar era in which certain modernist utopias were able to take shape. Adopting the principles of an information space, the exhibition takes the form of vast annotated archives. The most important object in the collection, however, is the school’s architecture itself, within which the museum is situated. The exhibition’s display furniture and signage are based on tall structures of raw metal that support boxes or cardboard surfaces, serving both as supports for objects and imagery and as spaces for displaying explanations.
Design team — laboratoire irb: Ruedi Baur, Denis Coueignoux, and Olivier Duzelier