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"Vitsœ's launch in Britain" by Stephen Bayley
1 June 1986
On the occasion of Vitsœ’s launch in Britain in 1986, Stephen Bayley, then the Director of the yet-to-be launched Design Museum, kindly penned the following for our first brochure.
Dieter Rams became chief designer of Braun, the Frankfurt electrical firm, at a time when the German economic miracle, once established, was beginning to take on significant forms. Rams’ versions of them are its aesthetic summit, as significant in their small way as ceiling frescoes and baptistery doors once were. In record players, razors, radios and kitchen machines he developed a house style whose geometric form depended as much on the traditions of the craftsman as on the severe discipline of the contemporary Hochschule fur Gestaltung. It is not too fanciful to see in Rams’ designs an expression of a traditional German taste for order: whether craftsmen or field marshals, his countrymen believe that life can be defined by mathematics.
This austere, restrained style depends on attention to detail and a careful relationship of the parts to the whole. It is as true of his furniture for Vitsœ as it is of his appliances for Braun that purity vies for effect with sculptural presence in the character of his designs. He has said, “I regard it as one of the most important and responsible tasks of a designer today to clear the chaos we are living in”.
Technological developments have turned the Rams aesthetic into no more than a quaint version of machine age sculpture when applied to electrical goods, but in the more stable world of furniture design Dieter Rams’ singular approach remains a model of clarity and reason.
Copyright Stephen Bayley, 1986