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Ulm Method and Design: Ulm School of Design 1953-1968

by Ulmer Museum / HfG-Archive, with essays by Gui Bonsiepe, et al
Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2003
208 pp., illus. 259 b/w, col. Paper, 28.00€
ISBN: 3-7757-9142-6.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614, USA

ballast@netins.net

The Hochschule fur Gestaltung (German for "College of Design," commonly shortened to HfG) was founded in Ulm, Germany, in 1953, so the publication of this book (as well as an exhibition at Ulm) was one way of marking its fiftieth year. Its founding was spearheaded by a German woman named Inge Scholl as a posthumous tribute to her martyred brother and sister, who were executed by the Nazis in 1943 for their role in the German resistance. The school is also sometimes called the Ulm Bauhaus, because she and its founding director, Swiss designer Max Bill (who had been a student at the Dessau Bauhaus), considered it the "true continuation" of the original Bauhaus, which had been closed by the Nazis in 1933. While the HfG lasted only fifteen years, it was in ways a great success, sufficient proof of which is found in our own homes. For example, nearly all of us own household appliances (coffeemakers, electric razors, kitchen machines) that were designed or influenced by Braun, an industrial firm that began in Frankfurt. Among its chief designers were Otl Aicher (who later married Inge Scholl), Hans Gugelot, and Dieter Rams, all of whom were affiliated with the HfG. The school was a failure in other respects, largely because of the conflicts among its faculty. Best-known was the unending battle about Max Bill’s assumption (as reflected in his curriculum) that art and design are intrinsically linked (a concept opposed by his colleagues who believed that design must be based on scientific principles), and his insistence that the school should be a Bauhaus successor. Over time, he was strongly opposed by many of the faculty, among them an Argentine theorist named Tomas Maldonado who became the school’s second director in 1964 (eight years after Bill resigned). This book is an interesting, valuable mix of photographic snapshots, reproductions of student work, examples of work by alumni, and seventeen interesting articles on such subjects as what it was like to have been there, and the impact of the Ulm Bauhaus on the curricula at other design schools.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 3, Spring 2004)

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