Max Bill and the Ulm School of Design.

The Swiss designer, architect and artist, Max Bill, was the first Dean of the influential Ulm School of Design and its architect and head from 1951 to 1956. This famous design school saw itself as the legitimate West German heir to the Bauhaus School, and in the 1950s and 1960s tried to create a 20th century style. They tried successfully, if its repercussions on industrial design, e.g. for the Braun company, are anything to go by.

The Ulm stool.

In cooperation with Hans Gugelot, Max Bill designed the Ulm stool in 1955 for the interior of the Ulm School of Design. This piece of furniture can be a seat, an occasional table, shelf or portable tray all in one.

Beds, tables and chairs. The Manufactum furniture range.

»What we need is a culture of carpentry. And if artistic designers today would only go back to painting pictures or take to sweeping the streets, we would have it«. When the famous Viennese architect, Adolf Loos, said this he was highlighting a problem which had become all too apparent at the beginning of the century. For a thousand years, the shapes and designs invented by various craftsmen had kept pace with the gradual change of the times. Craftsmen had created a myriad beautiful things on the long journey from the abstract style of Romanticism to the clarity of the Biedermeier period. Then, with the political, economic and social revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, breaking with tradition became synonymous with progress, and slowly evolving design standards lost their relevance in the daily world. Art, racing from one new style to the next, started to focus squarely on the profane world of the utilitarian. Thus began the long road into ugliness at the end of which we now find ourselves. In the final instance, the 20th century did not spawn any unique style, but instead generated any number of stylistic revolutions, design schools, fashions, trends and gimmicks. In so doing, it has of course also tried and rejected an equally bewildering number of materials, forms and tastes. Perhaps the advent of the industrial revolution is to blame, since it led to the disappearance of the »master craftsman«, who was somewhere between a worker and an artistic designer. Or the inherent nervousness of an era in which people actually believed that each new awakening brought them one step closer to paradise on earth - for with each new disappointment at not reaching Eden, they grew ever more tired of the ÔprogressÕ made. Whatever the cause, it is a long and complicated story. However, the applied arts (or rather their successor, namely design) are evidently incapable of producing anything that can be taken seriously, making necessity into a rather dubious virtue: they are no longer serious about anything at all. The design schools, from »Memphis« to »post-modern«, see the whole thing as a game. Nevertheless, here and there we can still see traces of what a 20th century carpentry culture such as that championed by Loos, would have been like or could have achieved. After all, it could have drawn on a long tradition of craftsmanship, instead of new style techniques and contemporary thought (instead of wanting to be years ahead), and it would have treated things seriously, not flippantly. Proof of this can be seen in:

-Scandinavian furniture, which was designed by brilliant minds who believed that radicalism was mere posturing and who respected local traditions rather than espousing the Central European preference for capricious experimentation.
-The products which came off the lathes in the German Workshops at the turn of the 20th century, whose founders used the new machines without feeling that a radical break with tradition was necessary.
-Finally in the craftsmanship demonstrated by other furniture makers who eschewed provocative design revolutions and chose instead to make unremarkable furniture for unremarkable purposes. If you are now sitting comfortably, let us begin.

Chairs.

A True Classic - and no other classic has tempted the ambition of artists more than this one has. Not a single decade of the 20th Century has passed in which this chair has not been reinvented ten times over - as though man's anatomy were an equally versatile, changeable and fleeting phenomenon as aesthetic zeitgeist. The motif for the vast majority of these »Seating Revolutions« was elegantly voiced by Christian Morgenstern as early as 1919:
»When I sit, I wish not to sit,
like my body would care to do,
but as would like my inner spirit,
if it were to create a chair so true.
However, so little needeth the chair,
appreciates little else but the flair,
it leaves the purpose of the stool,
to the hoi polloi and every fool.«