The home of Dieter Rams is the perfect showcase for the longevity of his designs. In his self-designed bungalow - a modern building with a Japanese-style garden - everything looks exactly like the house visit of an American film team in the seventies. Everything obeys functional principles, lots of white, no frills. Except that the current pictures come from a new film: "Rams" by Gary Hutswit.
The filmmaker visited the legendary product designer again and again in his house in the Taunus to interview the 86-year-olds. In Kronberg, Rams, head of the design team, coined product design at Braun for 40 years and lives here today. Of course, the self-designed Braun products are on the shelf. His turntable radio SK 4 for example.
The first design attempt of the skilled architect - was so futuristic at that time, so different than the heavy Tonmöbel, which were so far in German living rooms, that the competition mocked only about the "snow box coffin" - and later tried, the tidy, today one would say "clean", copy design. Or the transistor radio T3, which decades later Apple founder Steve Jobs should serve as a model for the iPod.
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Photo gallery: Good design is as little design as possibleOne of the few splashes of color in the entire house: A bright red "Valentine", the iconic typewriter by the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, on the Rams still taps his ideas to this day. Hustwit's first film also had something to do with writing: "Helvetica", a tribute to the Helvetica font, had given him some notoriety in 2007. After working on the human relationship to the product ("Objectified") and urban planning ("Urbanized"), he now presents a kind of fan movie.
For "Rams" he accompanied the name of the film also to London to Vitsœ, whose system furniture supervised the product designer design. An exhibition opening in Weil am Rhein was also on the shooting schedule. Above all, the film shows that Rams' designs were always the result of teamwork. Hustwit captures every single colleague involved in the design process - from brainstorming to manufacturing the first prototypes.
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Anyone who still lives tells in interview excerpts enthusiastically of the collaboration with the young architect Dieter Rams, who had suddenly become an industrial designer. Especially close was the exchange with Hans Gugelot, who considered design as well as Rams as an improvement and far from any beauty issues. The lacquered sheet metal housing with punched ventilation and speaker slots of the SK 4 was his idea.
In between, again and again Dieter Rams himself, in the Rams signature look: horn-rimmed glasses, corduroy jacket, bright, with 86 years still somehow ageless face. "Less, and better," he sums up his design principle. Three words where others would have wasted three pages. Typically Rams. Good design is as little design as possible. Kronberger sticks to this credo.
Too much frills!
As clinical, almost ethereal, Rams' products seem at first glance, so much does he believe in the need to experience things in a sensual way. Digitization is astonishingly pessimistic to Rams: he can not quite understand what is changing in the brains, but that something changes is clear to him. His explanation goes something like this: Where the flood of images never breaks down, boundless consumer desires are enshrined, which fuel a constant production of superfluous things.
Another critical point is the view of colleagues: The passionate colleagues' peal that Dieter Rams demonstrates in the Schaudepot of the Vitra Design Museum is one of the most impressive scenes: "This," he points to a design classic with the walking stick, "seems to me completely superfluous." Too much frills, decor are for Rams: "nonsense!" When he has calmed down, he adds: One does not have to like everything. "Rams" but, the man and the movie, that's great products.
"Rams" by Gary Hustwit runs in selected cinemas and can be streamed on the website of the filmmaker for a fee.