DESIGN | BAUHAUS CENTENARY


The Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany


repurposed production lines. Furniture and housewares company Herman Miller was a leader in Modernist design in the US. The company worked with many gifted designers, most notably Charles Eames, who had first been exposed to the Bauhaus style during a visit to Europe in 1929. Eames was enthusiastic in his use of exposed


Right: Braun S50 shaver with plastics body, 1950. Photo: Cooper Hewitt


collection, Smithsonian Design Museum


Below: DAR fibreglass armchair, 1950, designed by Charles and Ray Eames


through designing products that could be made using new methods of mass manufacturing. The Bauhaus approach also elevated the importance of manufacturing in the design process, leading to debates about craftsmanship versus mass production, individuality versus standardisation. Despite the manufactured appearance of furniture and objects designed at the Bauhaus, it was generally not successful in transfer- ring hand-made versions to mass production. An exception was the tubular metal furniture designed by Marcel Breuer, including his famous cantilever chair made by Thonet from 1930/31. By 1933 the Bauhaus was finished, and the plastics era had barely begun -- poly- ethylene was discovered in the same year by researchers working at Imperial Chemical Industries in the UK. But the dispersal of Bauhaus teachers and alumni to other European countries, and particularly to the USA, guaranteed that the ideas and aesthetics of the Bauhaus spread to other schools where they taught and where younger designers were eager to implement the concept of Good Design in the blossoming manufacturing industries. The advent of the Second World War slowed the growth of the consumer market for manufactured products, yet it was also the reason for the rapid scale-up of factories, and it demon- strated the usefulness of plastics in everything from nylon stockings to acrylic cockpit canopies. When the


PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, TEO JAKOB


26


post-war recovery in the US led on to the country’s consumer boom in the 1950s, industrial designers were ready to harness their designs to the new moulding possibilities of plastic materials and the mass manufacturing potential of


INJECTION WORLD | April 2019


materials, such as plywood and metals, and in 1948 he turned to plastics, designing a fibreglass armchair with his wife Ray for the Museum of Modern Art’s International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design. The armchair and its variants were among the first unlined plastic chairs to be mass manufactured. The polyester material reinforced with fiberglass had been developed by the US Army and the chairs were produced by Zenith Plastics using the latest machines, such as hydraulic press moulds from shipbuilding. In Europe, too, plastics made a break-


through in the post-war designs of many leading consumer goods companies. In Germany, Braun had been one of the first companies to use plastics to produce components, making radio dials and knobs in plastics in 1925. The company’s manufacturing lines were redirected to Germany’s military production in the Second World War, but when its factories were rebuilt after the war they resumed with electrical products. In 1950, it launched new products and appliances for the kitchen and home, such as the plastic- bodied S50 electric shaver. Erwin Braun (who led Braun with his brother Artur after the


death of their father Max in 1951) developed the idea that the Modernist design ethic in


furniture could be applied to household products and this would increase sales by making Braun products more desirable to consumers. The man chosen to head Braun’s design-led


transformation was Fritz Eichler, who started the company’s design department and created interdisciplinary teams that included advisers, designers and intellectuals. Braun also commis- sioned external designers, including Wilhelm Wagenfeld, who had studied at the Bauhaus, and Otl Eicher and Hans Gugelot, who taught at the Hochcschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, established in 1953 as a successor institute to the Bauhaus. Braun says in its history: “With Eichler, Wagen-


feld, Gugelot, and Aicher, Braun implemented its corporate vision of a wholly new language of design: working together, and in the space of just eight months, they developed what at the time was a radical new image for the company’s entire


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