The Werkbund Archive – Museum of Things (Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge) is devoted to the material culture of the 20th and 21st centuries shaped by industrial mass production. The core of the institution is formed by the archive of the German "Werkbund", an association founded in 1907 and made up of artists, industrialists and cultural politicians seeking to initiate fundamental reform ("Lebensreform") and a more modern-objective design of industrially manufactured products, architecture and living spaces. The major themes of the movement were quality, the appropriate use of materials, practicality, functionality and sustainability.
The Werkbund Archive – Museum of Things takes up a conscious position within this tradition and sees its task in material preservation and scientific documentation as well as in contemporary interpretation and reflection.
The museum has been collecting historically important design objects, items and archival material since the 1970s, with each item documenting our modern everyday life as it is affected by commodity culture. The museum currently has a collection of around 25,000 objects. It is located in a former factory building and functions as an open depot in which visitors have the opportunity to observe directly how the museum handles the collections on a space of roughly 500 square metres.