Braun and the Ulm School

Braun and the Ulm School are a German design tradition of the 1950s and 1960s. The Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm trained designers in rational, scientific thinking, and the company Braun gave their ideas form in radios, shavers and kitchen machines with clean forms, clear buttons and few colours.

Facts

A new Germany

After the Second World War many Germans wanted to break with the past and build a democratic, rational society. Design took part in that. The school in Ulm was founded in 1953 by Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill, and was counted as the successor of the Bauhaus. Bill had himself studied at the Bauhaus and also designed watches, see Max Bill’s watch. In the ruins left by the bombing there was both need and opportunity to start again from the beginning, and design was seen as a way of making everyday life simpler and more democratic.

The school placed great weight on science and method. The students learned not only to draw but also semiotics, ergonomics, mathematics and sociology. The idea was that design is not an art of decoration but a way of solving problems for people. The school closed in 1968, but its methods spread around the world.

Braun looks for a new form

Max Braun founded the company in 1921 in Frankfurt, and after his death in 1951 his sons Artur and Erwin Braun took over. They wanted to give Braun a new identity after the war and hired Fritz Eichler as design chief. He made contact with Ulm and had Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams develop new products.

The first breakthrough was the radio-phonograph SK 4 of 1956, designed by Rams and Gugelot, with a lid of clear plastic that gave it the nickname Snow White’s coffin. It was simple, austere and without a wooden cabinet. Two years later followed the pocket radio T 3 by Rams, with a round loudspeaker and objective buttons. Rams also worked in a team with colleagues such as Reinhold Weiss and Dietrich Lubs, and the group together designed many of Braun’s best-known objects.

Dieter Rams and the principles

Dieter Rams came to Braun in 1955 and became design chief in 1961. He designed radios, loudspeakers, shavers, kitchen machines and audio systems, and fixed a style: smooth surfaces, neutral colours such as white and grey, and buttons that are clear, with small accents in orange or green. Read more under Dieter Rams and in the guide to Dieter Rams and the ten principles.

His motto was weniger, aber besser, that is, less but better. Good design is, according to him, innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting and environmentally conscious. The principles have influenced product design all over the world, and can be read as the opposite of a decorative style.

The legacy

The Ulm School and Braun also influenced graphic design. The school advocated a clean, objective language of form, with plain typefaces instead of decorative ones. You can follow this further in the guide to Helvetica, which became the best-known typeface of the International Style. In the United States Rams’s ideas later shaped Apple’s design.

Braun fits into Functionalism but is also calmer and more subdued. Compare with the softer forms of mid-century modern, and set it in the period in the optimism of the postwar years. You recognise a Braun product by the fact that everything has a function, nothing is decoration and everything is in its place.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What was Dieter Rams’s motto?