Meeting Dieter Rams in Vitsœ’s still relatively new British factory in Leamington Spa last February, my mind went back to our first encounter more than 40 years earlier at Braun’s headquarters in Kronberg, a suburb north-west of Frankfurt. He was in his early 50s then, but his hair was already snow white. He was dressed in what could have been a descendant of the same caramel-coloured corduroy jacket that he wore in the 1980s – in contrast the drawing office staff wore white coats like laboratory technicians. The context was somewhat different this time. The Braun studio in 1983 was a study in neutrality: an entirely monochrome interior in which the only splash of colour came from the vivid orange pack of Ernte23 cigarettes that Rams twisted continually in his hands as we talked.
Vitsœ in its current incarnation in Britain, the creation of its managing director Mark Adams, has a warmer atmosphere. The factory is generously proportioned, naturally lit and ventilated and uses almost no power from the grid. It is built from high-performance laminated veneer timber that gives it the refined sense of fitness for purpose of a sailboat designed for speed. A reflection perhaps of the involvement, alongside delivery architects Waugh Thistleton of Martin Francis. Though he trained as a furniture designer, Francis worked with Norman Foster for 20 years, among other things on devising the façade of the Willis Faber building in Ipswich that hangs like a three-story high undulating glass curtain. He engineered IM Pei’s design for the pyramid at the Louvre, and has designed a number of impressive boats himself. The Leamington building is the architectural analogy for the infinite adaptability offered by the 606 Universal Shelving System designed by Rams that is Vitsœ’s most successful product.
Over the course of his long career, Rams has only worked for two companies. He joined Braun aged 23 in 1955 and remained there until his retirement in 1997. He was a consultant to Vitsœ, the company founded in 1959 in Frankfurt by Niels Vitsœ, an importer of Danish furniture to what was then still West Germany, and Otto Zapf, a designer from Frankfurt, and Rams him-self. Rams brought the sensibility of his work as an industrial designer to the storage and seating that he designed over the years for Vitsœ. He saw them both as expressions of an underlying system. But the trajectory of the two companies was very different. Braun was a family firm founded by Max Braun, and led, when Rams joined, by Braun’s two sons, Erwin and Artur. In 1967, Gillette bought a controlling stake in the company for the equivalent of $500m in today’s values. Rams had no qualms about American owner-ship. “They bought us because of our designs, and they had an idea to use us to design a premium range for Gillette. I got invited to Boston to meet senior people ahead of the rest of the Braun management team, but it came to nothing,” Rams told me. Until 1984 Braun remained an autonomous business within the Gillette orbit. There after, Braun went through a period of managed decline that was to accelerate after Rams’ retirement. Whole product divisions were abandoned or sold off. The final flicker of Braun from the Rams era was extinguished in 2005 when Procter and Gamble bought Gillette. Braun is now a label without a personality, lost inside a sprawling conglomerate. The Braun name has been licensed to a wide range of businesses. Watches and clocks are made in China by a Hong Kong-based firm. De’Longhi of Italy have the license for household appliances.
The cultural ambition of the original Braun ideal survives in Vitsœ. The Vitsœ building in LeamingtonSpa is not a factory in the sense of a traditional production line. It assembles, packages and distributes tailor-made storage installations, as well as some of the seating ranges that Rams designed for Vitsœ, along with his side tables. Mark Adams began by working as Vitsœ’s distributor in 1985. After Niels Vitsœ retired, Adams took over the leadership of the company, and then in 1995, in a move that ran counter to the direction of most industries that have been moving east, he switched production and operations to Britain, rather than the other way around. He set up in London, and then made the move to its purpose-built HQ in Leamington Spa. The whole team, from finance to social media, cabinet-makers to dispatch, eat lunch together every day. It is cooked by Will Leigh, a chef who used to work for Jeremy Lee at the Blueprint Café at the Design Museum in London. He is happy to turn the vegetables that some staff grow at home into chutney or jam in specially labelled Vitsœ jars. Over lunch, the view from the dining area looks out onto Kim Wilkie’s landscaping.
The American graphic designer Tom Strong donated his collection of more than 250 Braun products, from cine cameras to electric shavers, radios to television sets, to Vitsœ, and it is now displayed in the building. The pieces offer the chance for Rams to reflect on his work. As he sits with evident pleasure on an example of a 620 sofa made in Britain by Vitsœ, I ask him about his relationship with Niels Vitsœ. “Most of the ideas came from me,” Rams replies. He had been working on the idea of a universal storage system from 1957, partly because of the work he was doing on designing display shelves for Braun showrooms. He offered it to the firm set up by Vitsœ and Zapf in 1959 when he secured Braun’s permission to work for another company. Rams was introduced to Niels Vitsœ by Zapf, a Sudetenland German, expelled from Czechoslovakiain 1945, who was working on display units that he offered to Braun. Zapf worked together with Rams on the designs for what was initially called Vitsœ and Zapfbut left in 1969 and set up his own business.
“I got to know Otto Zapf because he would some-times come to my office. Once he showed me some designs for what I would call ‘normal’ furniture, rather than what we knew at the time as ‘modern’. He told me he had done them for Niels. He was very proud of them, but they were not for me. He wanted me to recommend someone to photograph them, and I suggested somebody that I knew from Braun. Niels was very different to Otto. It came to the point where they didn’t understand one another. They were starting to fight with each other, instead of working together. I always found myself caught between them. But I was closer to Niels Vitsœ because he had the production facilities. After the photo session, Zapf asked me if I would be able to design some furniture with him. I didn’t say yes, andI didn’t say no. But it soon came to the point where I discovered that with the production facilities Zapf had, he would not be able to realise the design I had in mind. ”
Rams is often associated with the Ulm design school opened in 1953 by the graphic designer Otl Aicher, his wife Inge Scholl, with the Bauhaus graduate Max Bill as the rector. But for Rams, who had apprenticed as a carpenter and studied interior design, then worked for a Frankfurt architect before being recruited by Braun, the relationship was more personal than institutional. He liked Hans Gugelot, the Dutch-born architect who worked in Max Bill’s office and was then recruited to lead the industrial design programme at Ulm. It was Gugelot and Rams working together who produced the SK4 radiogram with the Perspex lid that defined the stereo for three decades. “My contact at Ulm was with Gugelot. I had no problems with Bill, but when we met, he couldn’t see me, I was empty air to him. ”
Rams has had a remarkable impact on design not just in the second half of the 20th century when he was most active, but also in the 21st century in ways that would have been hard to predict when I interviewed him for the Sunday Times in the 1980s. The artist Richard Hamilton usedthe imagery of Rams’ designs for Braun, and even the company logo as the subject matter of his own work. There were Hamilton screen prints based on Braun’s toaster, and even ‘The Critic Laughs’, a sculpture featuring a set of plastic dentures impaled on the barrel of a Braun electric toothbrush. For Hamilton this was more than irony, or scepticism about consumerism. “I have for many years been uniquely attracted towards his design sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s,” he wrote. The tribute to Rams’ ET66 calculator paid by Jony Ive’s calculator interface on the first-generation iPhone certainly helped maintain a mystique around the Rams language of design. There was also the idea that Braun, according to Rams, provided a sense of order in a troubled world. The work-manlike way that each part of the Rams universe had its place, represented by the coded sets of numbers and letters that he used to designate each component, helped to suggest that everything was part of a bigger plan. As Sam Hecht, co-founder of the London studio Industrial Facility, once put it, "every piece he has ever done looks as if it has been designed for the same room.” And then there was Rams’ own way of describing his designs. How could you not warm to a designer who suggests that he is trying to achieve the qualities of a well-trained English butler, always discrete and invisible when not required, but ready to perform effortlessly well when needed. Of course we love Braun, and that far-off past, before our own times when the only butlers left in Britain work for oligarchs.
How, also, could you not warm to a designer who talked about his distress at the untidy world to the extent that he took a sack with him on country walks to gather the litter he encountered. In this Rams context, the Vitsœ projects are particularly important and poignant. The pace of technological change has inevitably made many categories of consumer electronics such as those exquisite cine cameras, Hi-Fi systems and open-reel tape players redundant. But the 606 Universal Shelving System, which is 65 years old, is still as relevant as it has ever been. And components madet oday still fit parts from the original production run.
Atelier 1 Audio System
The Atelier audio component system, in production between 1980 and 1990, was designed to be stacked vertically or horizontally, a format which was widely adopted by other manufacturers. There was a record, player, a tuner, a cassette player and an amplifier. From 1982 it came with a matching stand. A TV monitor was added in 1986. “The last system that was made using Braun technology. After this, the systems were built with lots of different components from Asia. We couldn’t control the quality and the consistency anymore.” Dieter Rams
620 Chair Programme
Dieter Rams devised the 620 Chair Programme that, like his 606 shelving, was a kit of parts that could be configured in multiple ways. The basic module was a lounge chair, which can be configured as a two or threes eat sofa. It can have a high or a low back, mounted on castors or a swivelling base and has a matching stool. With modifications, it has been in continuous production since 1962. Customers still replace the upholstery – in their own homes – 50 years after their original purchase. “At the end of a photographic session, Otto Zapf came up with a question for me. He asked if I was able to make some furniture with him. I didn’t say yes, and I didn’t say no.” Dieter Rams
FS 80 TV
“The first free standing television like this was made by Wega, which was then sold to Sony by a manager who had worked for Braun. I was very interested in getting him back for our Hi-Fi business. But he was placed in an impossible position, management was changing too fast, so he went to the competition.” Dieter Rams
Lady Braun style electric shaver
“I always think about the all-male design team designing what they called the Lady Braun, and wondering what psychology is going on there.” Mark Adams.
“I was always against these products, but there was no help for it. It was a very strong business at this time for Gillette. It was a business which they needed, and they wanted to expand the shaver series.” Dieter Rams
Domino ashtray
For years, Braun was noted for its cigarette lighters, and the accompanying ashtrays. As a heavy smoker, Rams took a keen personal interest. Unlike most Braun products, they came in a range of bright colours. “You need some activities also with colours. And that’s what was behind this ashtray. It had a psychological function. You could put them on a smoking table, instead of a vase of flowers. With Gillette behind them, the Braun management were focused on exporting worldwide. They wanted smaller items that were easier to ship, easier to handle and to service.” Dieter Rams
ET66 control calculator
The tribute to Rams’s ET66 calculator paid by Jony Ive’s calculator interface on the first-generation iPhone certainly helped maintain a mystique around the Rams language of design. “Ettore Sottsass once told me during the Memphis era that he had wanted to get away from the pressure of working for Olivetti with Memphis, and then found he had a lot of followers. I prefer using colour like on the ET66 where it has a purpose.” Dieter Rams
D6 Combiscope
Slide projectors were part of the Braun range as early as the 1950s. The Combiscope was an ingenious blend of projecter and slide viewer. “I still like this. I was lucky to have always had the possibilities of exploring new technologies.” Dieter Rams
Nizo S8 Super 8 cine camera
Braun took over the Munich-based manufacturer Niezoldi and Krämer in 1963, and gave their dated looking products the Dieter Rams look with the original optical quality. “This was still a Braun decision. They bought Niezoldi and Krämer, shortened to Nizo. They were based in Munich. I was often at this time in Munich. I never forget it. They have their breakfast late in the morning, the second one. And always with weisswurst. It was too early for me to eat this heavy food. And they have again, not a little glass, but they have this mass, they call it mass, to drink beer.” Dieter Rams
This feature appeared in Issue 2 of Anima, head here to purchase a copy or subscribe