It was not until 1964 that documenta 3 positioned itself within the debates on design with a special exhibition. It opened late on August 22, 1964 at the Staatliche Werkkunstschule and received its own exhibition publication: in addition to "Volume 1: Painting and Sculpture" and "Volume 2: Drawings,” there was "Volume 3: Industrial Design, Graphics.” In the accompanying catalog, Bode spoke of "penetrating peripheral areas," which documenta was now getting involved in.
The special show was the responsibility of the graphic artist Jupp Ernst, director of the Staatliche Werkkunstschule Kassel. Already during his directorship at the Werkkunstschule Wuppertal, he had endeavored to integrate fine art into design education and, at the same time, from 1951, established one of the first institutes for industrial design. Ernst had been a member of the documenta Council since 1963 and in this function was also active in the Industrial Design and Graphic Design Working Committee. It was in this function that he set up the special show.
The Industrial Design department showed works from the field of technical industrial design, such as capital goods and office machines, flanked by large-format photographs of bridges, machines, trains, etc. Ernst thus reached the level of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, which had changed direction at the end of the 1950s and was planning an expansion of the Bauhaus concept into current design areas. At the same time, he took up discussions that were a focus of Werkbund circles as well as many design institutions that were newly created in the postwar period. Former Bauhaus teacher Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Bauhaus student Herbert Hirche, whose works were exhibited in Kassel in 1964, also had a decisive influence on post-1945 design and its updated discourses.
The handling of applied art and design is therefore a vivid indicator of how the Bauhaus was negotiated as a model by the makers of the first documenta exhibitions. The autonomy of painting and sculpture guaranteed in artistic abstraction seemed to Bode—like many protagonists of postwar modernism—to ensure a higher-quality spirituality beyond everyday political events. One of the main opportunities that the Bauhaus identification model offered its followers, the ability to shape life itself, was missing in the early documenta exhibitions with the restriction to visual art.