The move towards architectural Modernism started in the 1920s in Germany as a protest against the imitation of historical styles that had predominated until the end of the First World War. The newly founded republic wanted to show the political break with the past in its architecture as well, using a new formal language and new building types and spatial concepts. The shape of a building should express its structure architecturally, and external form should follow internal function. At the same time, architects were responding to the complete change in social structures brought about by the war.

There was now a need to improve citizens’ living conditions to match the demands made by medicine for well lit and ventilated rooms. This led to features like larger window apertures and an adequate number of open spaces – often on the new flat roofs. Many things that every architect now takes for granted as basic planning rules were new design forms that emerged at this time. But the necessary buildings – houses and blocks of flats, housing estates, transport buildings, sports facilities, hospitals, schools, cultural centres, museums, theatres, opera houses, offices, department stores and industrial structures – were the same then as they are now, and thus comparable in terms of functional realization. Ecological notions of the environment are the only things that have since become considerably more significant.

The Weißenhof-Siedlung in Stuttgart was a landmark in the international triumphal progress of "Neues Bauen" – literally "New Building". It was the principal attraction at the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart DIE WOHNUNG (Housing): 17 architects from Belgium, Germany, France, Holland and Austria constructed 21 buildings containing 63 residential units in the former garden of a Stuttgart family of bakers called Weiß. As well as this housing estate, another part of the overall project took place near the Neues Schloss: the "International Planning and Model Exhibition of New Architecture". The organizers of the Werkbund project used this accompanying exhibition to put this new approach to architecture in its international context and thus to defend it against its numerous critics.

This exhibition, which in a different form toured 17 European cities from 1928-1930, was like an imaginary museum, bringing together example of modern buildings from America and Europe. It showed how much they were the same, and how they depended on each other in their simultaneous emergence. Some of the most famous architects of the 20th century, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, J.J.P. Oud and others made suggestions for this exhibition. Ludwig Hilberseimer hung image of over 500 exhibits by 129 architects and compiled the accompanying book "Internationale Neue Baukunst" (International New Architecture).

The "Neues Bauen International 1927 2002" exhibition is based on this project. But from the outset the aim was not to reconstruct the historical show completely. The curator, Prof. Karin Kirsch, opted to select those buildings and architects whose approach still stands up in architectural history today, after the second Modernist movement and post-Modernism, but also after the fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification. They may even seem to be pointing to the future even more than they did in their own day. This has produced a new exhibition that permits an almost breathtaking overview of the icons of early Modern architecture. Examples by members of the Dutch avant-garde group "De Stijl" are particularly colourful. Gerrit Rietveld’s small Schröder/Schräder House in Utrecht, dating from 1924, and Cornelis van Eesteren’s designs, some of which he worked on with Theo van Doesburg, are real visual jewels. And we must also not forget Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s enormous charcoal drawings, which he drew standing up against the wall, they have become the most exciting part of the exhibition artistically. Comparison with other charcoal or chalk drawings by Hans Poelzig and Hans Scharoun shows him to be the absolute master.

So the "Neues Bauen International 1927 2002" exhibition consists of 105 projects by 66 architects or groups of architects; they break down into seven thematic groups:
detached houses and villas
blocks of flats and housing estates
buildings for education, sport, culture and health
office, commercial and industrial buildings
transport facilities
special projects
city of the future

The exhibition presents a 20th century invention at the beginning of the 21st century. Something that can be found in cities in many countries on almost all continents with certain deviations as a result of national characteristics and local conditions. The fact is that "Neues Bauen" developed into an international movement, a joint effort by European and Russian architects that made an impact on the United States, Latin America and the Near East.

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