"In 1926 the Berlin architecture critic Adolf Behne received a photograph from Basel: depicted on it were four objects, prosaically arranged in a makeshift corner of a room. Entitled Co-op. Interieur, the photo had been sent by the architect Hannes Meyer who had composed the scene. Bearing the caption “Die Wohnung,” (The Apartment) the photo was published in the journal Das Werk, as the last of a series of images accompanying Meyer’s article “Die Neue Welt” (The New World). Behne used it almost simultaneously in an essay for the popular Berlin monthly magazine Uhu, commenting: “Extreme. A modern room, which will not be to everyone’s taste.” As the two parallel publications of that year intimate, Meyer sought to position this motif of a sparsely furnished interior as the illustration of an idea. With the photo of a room, distinguished as much by the absence of people, objects, and spatial characteristics, as it is by the uniqueness of its design, he was articulating a radical, anti-bourgeois lifestyle: rather than serving to gratify needs shaped historically, architecture and design were now the means to overcome precisely these constraints. What Behne interpreted as a matter of taste, constituted a general standard for Meyer. For Co-op. Interieur was not the draft of an interior design, but a manifesto for a different principle of living and thus for a new world."
