Once the work is completed, the heritage trust hopes to create a new 971 square metre exhibition space, allowing the museum to display some of the large industrial objects in its reserve collections for the first time.

BBC: Verdant Works

Beuys's distinctive use of industrial objects took shape in his Kurhaus years, but some of his earliest artistic traces can be found in Schloss Moyland ( moyland.de), a neo-Gothic castle outside Kleve housing the art collection of the van der Grinten brothers, two early supporters.

WSJ: Touring Beuys-World in Germany's Lower Rhine

Squeezed in the TV and smart phone market by Samsung, LG, Apple and others, Panasonic, Sharp, Toyota and others are trying to adapt their expertise in precision engineering and industrial design to everyday objects.

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Moreover, for all the rhetoric of functionalism, even in their own time the most notable 1920s and '30s Bauhaus buildings and objects were really aesthetic explorations of new materials and techniques, or conceptual critiques of life in an industrial age--rather than technological inventions or discoveries in the scientific sense.

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