In the history of modern architecture, there were certain exhibitions that had a huge impact on the architectural development of their time as well as later generations, either themselves or through their reception in the media, such as the Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927 or “Modern Architecture” in New York in 1932.

This series of canon-shaping exhibitions also needs to include an exhibition that is almost completely forgotten today and was held at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in the spring of 1914, shortly before the First World War. Its title was “New Building” (Neues Bauen).

This title was meant programmatically. The aim of the exhibition was to search for new forms for the new architectural style. It was in fact the first architecture show in Germany to abandon the then common concept of an encyclopedic overview of contemporary architecture as a historical-genetic retrospective in favor of a highly explosive current focus, industrial building, in order to derive aesthetic principles for a contemporary design approach that could be transferred to all areas of architecture. The curators explicitly wanted to reach a lay audience with this heuristic approach. They saw it as a didactic method to reawaken a general interest in architecture, which had become deeply alienated from people through the inflationary use of historical forms, as contemporary critics such as Hermann Muthesius noted with regret.

The term “New Building,” which would become a label and umbrella term for the “Modern Movement” (Pevsner 1936) in architecture during in the 1920s, therefore does not derive from the expressionist-revolutionary utopias after 1918, as has been repeatedly claimed, but from the reform context of the Wilhelmine Empire.

A catalog was published for the exhibition and it was reported on extensively in the periodicals. However, not a single photographic view is known to date. Unfortunately, we do not know what it looked like. This is probably one of the main reasons why this canonical show has remained an almost ephemeral event.

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