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 Bills
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 schools 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)