R is for Rams - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

Looking at the charmless and misshapen electric toothbrushes that carry the Braun logo today, or the questionable use that the latest Chinese licensees have made of the brand, it is hard to understand the impact that the company once had on how everyday things look. Braun in its golden age, the years between 1950 and 1975, defined a kind of high-minded materialism that retains a remarkably strong grip on the imagination, if not of every consumer, then at least on that of most designers. It was the celebration of the kind of simplicity that is not at all simple.

Braun, and Dieter Rams, the company’s long-standing head of design, gave the middle classes guilt-free permission to acquire their television sets and their stereo systems, the definitive domestic status symbols of the 1960s, by presenting them as if they were austere, serious-minded pieces of equipment rather than using the more obvious means of attracting attention. Some companies gave their products cute names; Braun just used letters and numbers. It made for a product range that seemed so high-minded that it might have come from a Bauhaus classroom which, by some curious quirk of social history, had found its way into the shopping malls of Europe. It had the self-confidence to act as if one of its food mixers could be understood not as just another electronic appliance but as the antidote to all the clutter produced by the wave of new-found affluence from the post-war years. Braun made consumer goods without a trace of the conventional artificial sweeteners of marketing, and without the benefit of much in the way of market research. For designers ever since, the language that Braun defined has been the starting point for any electronic appliance or domestic object that aspires to suggest a certain discreet and unthreatening modernity.

It’s a language that was the result of the work of Rams and the Braun design studio, which he ran from an unassuming building on the suburban fringes of Frankfurt for almost thirty years. Rams transfigured the most banal and the most humble of everyday things into ideal forms. He made objects that were never in any colour you liked. They were black, or they were white, with infrequent primary-coloured exceptions. If he had had his way, the only musical accompaniment to a Braun television commercial would have been composed by Schoenberg. Rams didn’t, of course, have his way, which resulted in one rather curious ad for an electric shaver that cut back and forth between a Porsche 911, with its tea-tray rear spoiler, ploughing through a grassy landscape, and a Micron Universal, its brushed-steel body embellished with black rubber dots, traversing the stubble of a human chin.

Rams made objects that hinted at some deeper meaning beyond their obvious purpose. Making toast, shaving or tuning a radio the Rams way was much like transubstantiation for his true believers. An electric razor from Braun seemed to offer the prospect of turning shaving from a time-consuming chore into a religious daily ritual. A Braun juicer made squeezing an orange into a painless version of the Japanese tea ceremony.

Rams’s Teutonic devotion to order and sobriety could irritate as well as seduce. When the artist Richard Hamilton first started tinkering with the Braun logo and attached a set of false teeth to the top of an electric toothbrush to create a work that he called The Critic Laughs, he was introducing a tinge of irony to his representation of the cult of good design. The Braun toaster had already been the subject of a series of Hamilton’s screen prints, and an essay by the English critic Reyner Banham. These were not quite the unquestioning endorsements of timeless platonic form that we now expect of Hamilton’s work.

Hamilton and Banham were conflicted about Braun. Their early attitudes to the Braun objects that they explored in their attempts to find significance in the consumerism that was changing the face of the world were those of the Independent Group. They wanted to celebrate throwaway pop culture all the way from Cadillacs to giant refrigerators. They were from the generation that had been through war and rationing, they endured baths limited to four inches of hot water, utility furniture and clothing coupons. They had had enough of restraint, and they weren’t keen on objects that were going to last for ever when there might be something newer and better to come along shortly. Reyner Banham, who had a weakness for the more robust American approach to product design, complained in one of his articles about the essentially authoritarian nature of a Braun toaster that came with an instruction manual that demanded tolerances of plus or minus four millimetres in the thickness of the bread that it could handle.

But as Hamilton continued to work on projects that used Braun designs as their point of departure, he abandoned ambivalence. In a text written for an exhibition on Braun in Berlin, he suggested that the toaster had the same significance for his art that Mont Sainte-Victoire had had for Cézanne.

Rams tried to give the everyday a kind of dignity and a sensibility that was reflected in every detail of his working environment, which was controlled with unrelenting precision. Each model, pencil, prototype, sample and drawing board in his Frankfurt studio was placed carefully in its proper place. They were precisely aligned with a grid that guided everything from the position of the storage shelves - a Rams design, of course - to the size of the floor tiles. The only colour came from the orange pack of Ernte 23 cigarettes that was constantly in Rams’s hands. The pack had the same effect as the occasional injection of colour that Rams introduced to the Braun palette. A lighter or a coffee maker might be finished in a colour stronger than his habitual monochrome, as Rams put it, ‘like a vase of flowers in a room’.

Despite the antiseptic materials, the studio did not feel clinical. Rather, it had the atmosphere of the carpentry workshop that Rams still keeps at home, even now he has retired, to serve as a memory of the cabinetmaking apprenticeship he went through before starting his architectural studies. Sam Hecht, the British industrial designer, once suggested that everything Rams designed in the course of his entire career seemed as if it had been designed for one room. If there ever were such a place, this was it.

When ‘Snow White’s Coffin’, the name that Braun’s competitors used to disparage the first-ever record player with a Perspex cover, was launched in 1956 under the official title of the SK4, Rams had no idea that what he had done would become the standard configuration for every hi-fi system that came after it for thirty years. It was a crucial project for the company founded by Max Braun after the First World War and newly under the control of his two sons, Artur and Erwin. The SK4 was Braun’s leap out of the age of valves and into transistorized technology. A new visual language was needed to show how much things had changed.

In the pre-war years Braun had specialized in making radios in which the task of the designer was understood as domesticating technology to make it fit for the living room. The two younger Brauns had ambitious plans to modernize the company, and to make it a cultural force as well as a technical innovator. They hired the film-maker Fritz Eichler, who acted as a creative inspiration for the company, and Hans Gugelot, who before his untimely death led the industrial designers working for Braun. Gugelot himself had been a teacher at the Ulm School of Design, the embodiment of German post-war modernity, where he had been an assistant to Max Bill. Bill had studied at the Bauhaus, offering Braun a connection to the heritage that Rams consciously drew on. And he was a credible artist, as well as a designer.

Dieter Rams, still in his twenties, had only recently arrived at Braun when the SK4 was being designed. He had come from Otto Appel’s architectural practice to work on designing showrooms for Braun. Appel had been an assistant to Albert Speer, working on his monstrous transformation of Berlin into the new Nazi capital city of Germania before the war. When Appel set up on his own, his practice had to rely on corporate modernism rather than National Socialism. He was the associate architect for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s US government projects in West Germany. And it was this version of mid-century modernism that shaped Rams’s view of design.

The SK4, Gugelot believed, had to break with the imagery of domestic furniture that had been used to house-train consumer electronics. But Gugelot’s idea of a metal lid for the record player didn’t work. The vibrations on the prototype were too distracting. Rams’s contribution was to use Perspex instead. ‘At first Gugelot said it was too flashy, too much about style, but he came around,’ said Rams.

Shortly after Gugelot died Rams took on the leadership of the Braun design team. Of all of the designers involved with Braun over the next three decades, Rams was the most determined, and the most consistent spokesman for its very specific approach to design. For Rams, the point of design is not to sell more things, but to make the ones that you do sell better. It was not a popular attitude with marketing departments. Rams could be seen as a designer who has tried to resolve the irresolvable contradiction between design as a cultural programme and design as a commercial activity.

Even if Rams was unable to match Max Bill’s lyrical range, it is clear that he was interested in how things look as well as in ergonomics, for all the emphasis that he places on logic and order. Rams took care to find the precise grade of clear plastic for the tuning panel on the front of his radiogram to show off the names of the stations. The backs of his radios were treated with as much precision as the front.

Meeting Rams in the mid-1980s felt something like encountering a sleeping legend, a giant lost in his Frankfurt Valhalla, awaiting the call to rescue another generation from the insidious dangers of postmodernism and decorative frills. The Braun that Rams had known, a moral guardian defending the values of West Germany at its peak, when an economic boom coincided with a sense of the responsibility that an enlightened capitalist economy has to the consumer, was about to expire. Braun was acquired first by Gillette and then by Proctor & Gamble, companies for whom such utopian values had little relevance. They simply wanted to sell Rams’s successful products as hard as they could, and to drop the lost causes. Electric shavers and toothbrushes had a future, but making stereo systems and TV sets for the mass market was no longer possible in Europe. Rams left soon after.

By this time, his work seemed like a throwback: electronic calculators had become technologically redundant. Their circuit boards, batteries, keys and LEDs could all be accommodated in an object the size and thickness of a credit card. They would shortly be subsumed into a mobile phone. But instead Braun offered something much more substantial. The Braun ET44 that Rams designed with Dietrich Lubs was being sold not as a piece of electronics but as tactile sculpture. It was a calculator that seemed to offer the consolations of perfection in the radius of every curve, the sequence of buttons, in the logic of the control system, the polycarbonate wallet which the calculator came in, and the colour coordination. In a messy, complex and possibly meaningless world, the ET44 was a reassuring promise of a fragment of stability and meaning.

Proctor & Gamble has licensed all the Braun clock, radio and watch designs to a company that uses Chinese factories to make them, and which allows them to use the Braun logo on new products that they have designed themselves. The Braun vision had flickered into life again when the calculator interface on the first-generation iPhone paid deliberate and eloquent tribute to the ET44 with its yellow and brown buttons.

The last time I saw Rams was in London at the Design Museum’s retrospective on his work. The museum created a space that evoked Rams’s own living room. The floor was tiled with the very particular grid of white tiles that Rams has at home. On the wall was the reel-to-reel tape recorder next to the amplifier next to the loudspeaker that Rams designed for Braun, so heavy that the museum’s technicians had to reinforce the wall specially. It was softly playing the Modern Jazz Quartet. The shelving system that Rams devised for Vitsoe lined the walls. There was a Braun TV set on the floor. On one level, nothing had changed since the 1960s. Rams’s aesthetic was as relevant as it had ever been. More so in fact, because today there are the followers, if that is how one can describe Jonathan Ive, Jasper Morrison, Sam Hecht and Naoto Fukasawa, all designers who work in a language which clearly reflects the restricted colour palette and the care with which Rams approached his work.

Rams told me once that he had met the provocative and determinedly playful French designer Philippe Starck. ‘Starck said, “Jonathan Ive, he has stolen everything from you for Apple.” ’ Rams does not see it that way. For him Ive’s appropriation of the calculator for the iphone was proof of the continuing relevance of his work.

Rams remains a formidable presence, as determined as a prophet. There are few designers in the present climate of moral relativism as prepared as Rams has been to put their names to a manifesto. Rams’s world view is summed up by his idea of less but better, the most important of his ten principles, which he published for the first time in 2008. That is to say that visual and physical longevity gives us the alibi that we need to feel a little less guilty as consumers.

Rams appeals to a generation of designers who are nostalgic for the sense of purpose that came from the moral certainty of the 1960s, and the seriousness of the Ulm School. They are fascinated by the lingering appeal of the analogue age. We have yet to find a way to inject that sensibility into what design will be, rather than referring back to what design once was. But it is a reminder of the continuing power of material objects, and the continuing charm of refined simplicity in the way that they are designed.