Karlsruhe is a small city near the Rhine in southern Germany. Planned in the 18th Century, it has long streets radiating from its central palatial Schloss. Toward the end of the first World War, in its south-western corner, an enormous munitions factory was built that "had been recognised at the time as one of the most advanced industrial buildings of its type. Its architect Philip Jakob Manz, had made use of the latest building technology in creating a skeletal frame in concrete that took formal as well as functional requirements into account."(2)

Not long after the completion of the Karlsruhe factory, the Bauhaus was established to the east in Weimar. The famous school of art and technology attempted to reconfigure the relations of art production and transform the role of the artist. Walter Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus, envisioned the institute to be a laboratory where artists collaborated with industry to create a new society. The later Bauhaus campus at Dessau, designed by Gropius, was inspired by these aspirations; it was a streamlined factory that embodied his catchphrase: "Art and Technology, a new unity"(3).