621 Side Table by Dieter Rams for Vitsœ. Image © Vitsœ.
621 Side Table by Dieter Rams for Vitsœ. Image © Vitsœ.
606 Universal Shelving System, 1960, by Dieter Rams for Vitsœ.A deep ethical current flows through Rams’ thinking and ripples into the products he designs. Its primary force is discipline, a word Rams uses to express the constraint a designer must exercise to “omit the unimportant,” let products express themselves and allow users to take their own pleasure in them. These goals contribute to a larger moral imperative: to enrich human life in a way that encourages holding on to things, rather than always seeking the new or the spectacular. This is a global struggle against excess, waste, visual pollution and environmental destruction. Since his retirement, Rams has continued to advocate these values forcefully in essays, interviews and exhibitions—and later this year in a documentary film—reasserting that design must serve rather than dominate people, and that it must help us feel comfortable with fewer things so that we can resist wasteful exploitation of material and energy. “We need new structures for our behaviours,” he declares, “and that is design.” For Rams, industry-art must not only evoke delight; it should also guide ethical thought. Design historian Klaus Klemp refers to Dieter Rams as one of the two great bridges of modern design. If earlier designers carried the traditions of art toward industry, Rams carries industry toward the home and civil society. Dieter Rams recognises the responsibility of designers to activate the liberating capacities of industriekunst and to enlist useful and agreeable objects in service of people and the planet.
620 Chair by Dieter Rams for Vitsœ.
620 Chair Programme, 1962, by Dieter Rams for Vitsœ.+ ALEX ANDERSON: You were an early pioneer of sustainability in its broadest sense, and a critic of wastefulness, visual pollution and triviality in design. Now that environmental sustainability has been in the public consciousness for a while, these broader issues are beginning to come around again. Would you agree with Lance Hosey, an architect and author on aesthetics and sustainability, who declared, “If it’s not beautiful, it’s not sustainable. Aesthetic attraction… is an environmental imperative”? DIETER RAMS: Beauty, not just appearance, that is both exemplary and instructive, certainly intensifies and prolongs the relationship with the user and therefore also makes sense ecologically. In my 10 principles of good design, I have written that the aesthetic quality of a product is an integral aspect of its usefulness, for the appliances that we use daily have an impact on our personal environment and influence our sense of well-being. But a thing can only be beautiful if it is also well made. Of course, there are general criteria of beauty such as harmony, contrast or proportions, but individual aesthetic sensibilities can vary a lot and can also depend upon knowledge, education and awareness. This is why I have always tended to steer well clear from this discussion about beauty and argued instead for a design that is as reduced, clear and user-oriented as possible and simply more bearable for a longer period of time. But “simple” is especially hard to achieve; even Leonardo da Vinci knew that.
图片 © Vitsoe.+ Does a conflict between practical utility and abstract beauty still encourage innovation in product design, or are there other more assertive mechanisms at play? Calm, sober and intellectual surprises should always be possible with design. Practical value and beauty are not mutually exclusive, even today, and they are unlikely to be so in the future either. For me, a restrained aesthetic and function that is as optimised as possible have always been important. These qualities lead to long utilisation cycles: The objects do not become visually unbearable after a short time because they have not pushed themselves into the foreground. Certainly, these qualities also act as a constraint upon innovation. We really should consider very carefully whether we constantly need new things. I have been arguing for a long time for less, but better things.
Phonosuper SK 4 by Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Hans Gugelot & Dieter Rams.
TP 1 radio:phono combination, 1959, by Dieter Rams for Braun.
L 2 speaker, 1958, by Dieter Rams for Braun.
RT 20 tischsuper radio, 1961, by Dieter Rams for Braun.
Braun ET 55 by Dieter Rams & Dietrich Lubs for Braun.+ Early on, artists, critics and manufacturers perceived two key benefits of industrial design: It made products both more desirable and more profitable, and it contributed to a general improvement of public taste. You seem to perceive a third benefit of industrial design, which is that it reduces wasteful consumption by producing objects that people will like and hold on to, which in turn benefits the environment. Do you think the consumer product industries feel a conflict between those earlier goals and this newer one? I completely concur with - 图片 © Adolf Behne that we need “comfort” instead of “luxury.” He believed that really good design should not be fuel for consumption that brings us nothing but irreparable resource problems and environmental destruction. There has been much and persistent talk about sustainable growth; it’s time to do something about it! The only plausible way forward is the less-but-better way: back to purity, back to simplicity. Simplicity is the key to excellence!
Ingeborg Kracht-Rams and Dieter Rams at Home in Berlin. Photo by Philip Sinden.
Dieter Rams’ Berlin home. On the wall L 450 flat loudspeaker, TG 60 reel-to-reel tape recorder and TS 45 control unit, 1962-64, by Dieter Rams for Braun. Photo by Philip Sinden.
Dieter Rams’ Berlin Home. Photo by Philip Sinden. + A number of authors have noted that your work was influenced by the Bauhaus. It seems more productive to think of your work as fulfilling the promise of Peter Behrens, widely considered the world’s first industrial designer and mentor to Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and many of their contemporaries. Very early in his career, Behrens declared that there is “a liberating quality” to the union of practical utility and abstract beauty because these were so often in opposition to each other in his era. Part of his success later, it seems, is that he capitalized on overcoming this opposition—with appealing and often surprising results. During your career at Braun, did you sense any continuity with the pioneering efforts of Behrens in his role of creative consultant at German industrial design company AEG? During the relatively short period of his position as artistic consultant to AEG, between 1907 and 1914, Peter Behrens did indeed— as one of the first industrial designers ever—have the opportunity to shape many areas of that company. What he succeeded with, above all, was overcoming historicism and also to a certain extent Jugendstil, which was so prevalent at the time. For me, his enduring achievement was that he showed clearly the value of collaboration between top management and design. When I arrived at Braun in 1955, their products were still conceived by engineers and detail engineers and censored by salespeople. In the early years, we began working on a more modest product language that derived from function but was stripped of the formal mendacity that was commonplace at the time. This was thanks to the appreciation and support given to design by the top management—in particular, Erwin Braun himself. In this respect, there were clear parallel design goals to those of AEG. I was most certainly aware of the Bauhaus culture during my studies at the College of Applied Arts in Wiesbaden. The founding director, Professor Hans Soeder, had based the school’s curriculum on Bauhaus principles. Particular role models were Mies and Gropius, who had also both worked as assistants in Peter Behrens’ office.
Dieter Rams’ home studio.+ Are there products that you use regularly and that you particularly enjoy, or that you think exemplify the principles of design you developed and refined over the years? My wife and I live in our house furnished predominantly, but not entirely, with products from Braun and Vitsoe. For example, the Vitsoe 606 Universal Shelving system: I designed it 56 years ago and still feel comfortable with it. When you live with products, you get to learn their faults so you can improve them and thus keep the designs alive for longer!
[Words by Alex Anderson. Photographs courtesy of © bpk / Abisag Tüllmann, Vitsœ and Philip Sinden - 转载自：Yellowtrace
- 语言：English
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发表于 2020-8-9 21:32:21
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