Shaping the face of the city: Design by the Weißensee School of Art in the Museum der Dinge

Striking triangles with elevations and edges form a ceramic grid. It can absorb and direct rainwater. The tiles use the growth of airborne algae as a living glaze. In the exhibition “Design for Berlin. Design from the Weissensee School of Art” it stands out in green and reddish-brown coverings on the light ceramic.

The microclimate of the city can be improved with interesting structural design elements like these. And also their appearance, which is particularly important to the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge as an exhibition center for design history and everyday culture.

The BVG IK series subways

What teachers and students at the Weißensee School of Art do can be summed up simply and meaningfully as follows: They shape the face of the city. Through print products such as posters for the Volksbühne or the Deutsches Theater, through chic stainless steel iced coffee cups such as those used in the Café Moscow on Karl-Marx-Allee in the 1950s (design: Christa Petroff-Bohne) or through the angular trains of the BVG IK series from Stadler, built in 2015, which are in use on the U1 to U4 railway lines.

Everyday life in the city dictates its needs to design. Teachers and students are influenced by life in a constantly changing Berlin. It is an interplay that has existed since the university was founded 80 years ago and can be heard in interviews with today’s students, who are gathered at a listening station at the beginning.

The chapter “The City of Tomorrow”, which shows the orange glowing solar panel “Powerplant” (design: Nick Geipel and Charlotte von Ravenstein), a free source of electricity for passers-by that is mounted on street lamps and is intended to enable spontaneous cell phone charging, is followed by the chapter “Water Stories”.

The photograph of a realized historical design by Weißensee lecturer Gertraude Pohl for a fountain in Marzahn, in which children splashed in 1987, hangs next to the rendering of Leopoldplatz today. In this idea, clay elements filled with plants and trickled with water promise cooling. But only if the student vision becomes reality.

It is a good idea by the curators Florentine Nadolni and Silke Ihden-Rothkirch, who studied design in Weißensee from 1986 to 1991, to contrast historical designs with contemporary student work. Especially since, according to their information, “Design for Berlin” is not an outline of the university’s history. The contemporary historical upheavals that have been inscribed in them still resonate.

For example, in a radio station with radio reports on the post-reunification conflict in the early 1990s, when the art college, which had survived all ideological hostilities in the GDR, was to be closed or integrated into today’s University of the Arts.

The famous Swiss architect and artist Max Bill also protested against this in 1991, praising with a Swiss accent the quality of the interdisciplinary design theory that is still practiced in Weißensee today and warning: “You cannot save money by leaving out quality.”

The goal: good design for everyday life

The University of Applied Arts was founded in the Soviet occupation zone in 1946. With the declared aim of not producing L’art pour l’art, but rather of directing the focus drawn by all the arts – painting, sculpture, graphics, stage design, fashion, textiles, ceramics, industrial design – to the practical design of everyday life in the war-torn city. The teachers in the early years were strongly influenced by the German Werkbund and the Bauhaus.

This is also proven by notes from the estate of the architect and designer Herbert Hirche, who in 1948 wrote his ideas for the Weißensee curriculum on the back of the stationery of the Berlin Bauhaus branch, which Mies van der Rohe had to close in 1933 under pressure from the National Socialists.

The Museum der Dinge initiated the show in Weißensee’s anniversary year, and the art school is cooperating. For example, in the scenography that was created for the show by the designers of tomorrow. It is characterized by strong black and yellow contrasts. The typography is new, but cites the seventies, which, according to curator Ihden-Rothkirch, are very popular with today’s students with their aesthetics.

The focus of “Design for Berlin” is on product design and commercial graphics. Larger crafts such as stage design or fashion design, on the other hand, are not included, but the Museum of Things lacks space.

Yesterday and today always purr together in concise images. For example, right at the beginning you can see a photo of the Kino International with the elegant, sans serif lettering from 1961, which comes from Klaus Wittkugel. The professor at the Weißensee School of Art was one of the most important commercial graphic artists and poster artists in the GDR.

The Berlinale poster with the crystalline polar bear in sunglasses that is emblazoned on the facade functions as a link to the present. Claudia Schramke, who has been designing the film festival posters since 2021, studied visual communication in Weißensee from 2012 to 2023. Every February their bears pave the city.

It’s logical that Alexanderplatz, which is only a ten-minute walk from the Kino International, also owes its look to the modern design from Weißensee. How the inventor of the world clock, Erich John, worked on the drawings for his planetary movements, which became a clock in 1969, can be seen in the sketches in his pocket calendar.

To the side of the clock hangs a Supa Hasi comic by the Berlin illustrator Mawil, who studied communication design in Weißensee in the 90s. Supa-Hasi also meets at the world clock, as does the entire city.

The fact that the Weißensee School of Art, as well as the Museum der Dinge, are affected by cuts in the Berlin budget does not seem like a footnote in view of the life-enriching importance of successful urban design.