GERMANY ARCHITECTURE MODELS

No country contributed more to the birth of modern architecture than Germany in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The buildings in this collection tell that story with unusual directness — not as a survey, but as a connected sequence of ideas and influences.

Peter Behrens designed the Behrens House in Darmstadt in 1901, an early experiment in total design where architecture, interiors and furnishings were conceived as a single unified work. His AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909) took those ideas into industry — a building of such authority and clarity that it is still regarded as one of the founding monuments of modern architecture. Among those who worked in Behrens's office and absorbed his approach were Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.

Gropius went on to design the Fagus Factory in Alfeld in 1911 — its glass curtain walls anticipating everything that would follow — and then the Bauhaus Dessau in 1925, the building that housed and embodied the most influential design school of the twentieth century. We offer the Bauhaus Dessau in two versions: the full façade model and a focused study of the entrance block.

The Berlin Cityscape map and Frankfurt Cityscape complete the collection, capturing two of Germany's great urban centres