026 REPORTER
Clockwise from top Living up to his principles of using ‘as little design as possible’, Rams’s designs showcase products that are at once simple while maintaining function and practical use
Rams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in
1932. He trained as an architect and applied for a job at Braun in 1955, where he quickly became involved in product design. He first made the move into furniture and interior design when presenting a sketch of his proposals for the new interiors at the company. The boldly modern scheme includes a track-based, wall-mounted storage system, which would become the 606 Universal Shelving System launched a year later by Vitsœ+Zapf, as it was then known. It was the start of a design partnership between Vitsœ and Rams, which it partially credited Erwin Braun who said Rams could develop his furniture range with Neils Vitsœ and designer Otto Zapf, to ‘help the market for our radios’. While he managed the design department for Braun until 1995, he still
works for Vitsœ today with the company attesting his products are more popular than ever. ‘Niels Vitsœ knew that the furniture designed and produced with Rams was ahead of its time. Almost 30 years after his death, Niels Vitsœ would be proud to see that his furniture is now sold to more than 80 countries,’ Adams tells me. ‘Rams’s design principles have had to evolve to accommodate the soft interfaces of many of today’s products. Weeks labouring over the position, shape and size of a button are probably gone. But the principles have stood up remarkably well, especially the need to make a product understandable, and the plea to be environmentally-friendly.’
Rams has been visiting the company’s new production building in Leamington Spa.
Returning home from his last visit, he’s created what he called, ‘My response to your building’. ‘Watch this space,’ says Adams, which I certainly am. I’m intrigued to know what work is coming next from the man who is often hailed as one of most influential industrial designers, given he is no longer giving interviews having said all he needs to say, he clearly doesn’t feel the same for producing good design. So what makes his designs so special? ‘Rams has observed that many try to copy his aesthetic by stripping away as much as possible but, in so doing, manage to lose the function and/or the ethic of the product’, says Adams. ‘When Rams has been asked this question, his answer has almost always been that the trick is, “As little design as possible”.’
ALL IMAGES: VITSOE
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