Home Stories. 100 Years, 20 visionary interiors

The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey into the past and shows how changes in society, politics and technology over the last hundred years have shaped the design of our domestic environment. It focuses on the radical shifts in design and the way Western interiors are used – from current topics such as the increasing shortage of living space to the blurring of boundaries between work and personal life.

The exhibition also focuses on the triumph of informal living in the 1960s and the advent of modern household appliances in the 1950s together with the beginnings of open-plan living in the 1920s. These radical shifts are illustrated with twenty influential interiors, including designs by architects such as Adolf Loos, Finn Juhl, Charles and Ray Eames, Lina Bo Bardi, artists such as Andy Warhol and Cecil Beaton, and the legendary interior designer Elsie de Wolfe.

Taken over from the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Home Stories  exhibition presents definitive milestones in the development of interior design. It shows that the central question in this debate, of how we want to live, is as current today as it was a hundred years ago, and has become even more relevant in the present Covid-19 pandemic.

Who would have thought that this subject could suddenly come to assume such immediate, urgent relevance? We hope that a visit to the exhibition will provide interesting ideas for negotiating everyday challenges: for example, the creation of work zones in private domestic interiors was something Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had already addressed in the 1920s, and some of the living pods from the 1960s might almost have been designed as hygienic solutions for social distancing.

On display are models, films, furniture, objects and other media, making the exhibition a rich and compelling journey through the recent history of the domestic sphere.