Out of the Display Case:
Junkerskoje

// Object Talk
Thu, 22 Sep 2022, 6 pm
Bauhaus Museum Dessau
Open Stage

Joost Schmidt designed this brochure together with Xanti Schawinski for the Junkers & Co booth at the 1929 Gas und Wasser exhibition in Berlin. The photos in the brochure offer a glimpse into the space of the advertising booth: The eye is drawn to the first display wall. Here the company’s bathroom and sanitary products are propagandistically highlighted as guarantors against bacteria and other pathogens. The Junkers booth was composed of a sequence of individual rooms: concrete show rooms, such as a modern bathroom with radiator and bathtub, alternated with demonstration pictures of individual apparatus and devices that resembled control panels of an industrial plant. Abstract relationships underlying the production of so-called gasiators were explained by diagrams and commentaries.

The brochure was part of the order that the advertising department had taken on from Junkers & Co Dessau in 1929. The Gas and Water exhibition in Berlin was a fair of achievements in the field of municipal infrastructures, household appliances, heating technology and sanitary installations. Here it was possible to see the hardware for the pressing issues of hygiene and health maintenance. Regina Bittner (Bauhaus Dessau Foundation) discusses this contribution of the Bauhaus to the Berlin exhibition in the context of a specific culture of showing in the Weimar Republic, in which social knowledge about hygiene and health, housing and infrastructure was popularly communicated to a broad public.