There is an exhibits of rams products at vitsoe at 33 Bond street through May 28. click here for details
CURRENTS | Q&A
Dieter Rams, Designer of Stereos, Shavers and Shelves
By RIMA SUQI
Published: May 11, 2011
Dieter Rams is considered by many to be a design legend. The 78-year-old German designer is probably best known for the work he did as the design director at Braun (a job he held from 1961 until 1997), where he was responsible for some of the best-looking and -sounding stereo components ever made, along with a host of other products like shavers and kitchen appliances. He has inspired a number of other designers, including Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa and Jonathan Ive, the senior vice president for industrial design at Apple, who wrote the foreword to “As Little Design as Possible: The Work of Dieter Rams,” by Sophie Lovell, out next month from Phaidon Press.
A Braun stereo he designed in 1956.
Mr. Rams with his shelving system.
The shelving system in one of his sketches.
Mr. Rams was recently in town to celebrate the 50th birthday of his 606 Universal Shelving System and to attend the opening of the corresponding exhibition, “60s 606 Is 50,” at the Vitsoe showroom in NoHo. On a recent afternoon, he was dressed in a sharp tan corduroy suit, wearing his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a cane, when he met a reporter at Vitsoe, a company created in 1959 to produce his designs.
That’s a nice cane.
The cane was a present from Nanna Ditzel 40 years ago. I never knew at that time I would need it one day. I had an operation. I have a new part in my knee, some mechanical thing.
Are you enjoying New York?
I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a “wonderful catastrophe.” It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood — the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.
The Oyster Bar?
Yes, it is always busy.
Are you really retired? You don’t seem like the retiring type.
Yes. I sit, I think, I make some drawings. As a designer, you cannot retire totally. I have some new things coming, but it’s a question of investigation and some money.
What’s an average day for you?
I am not an early bird. I go to bed normally between midnight and 1 o’clock, so it is understandable that I cannot be an early bird. I wake up around 9 o’clock. Even when I was with Braun, and I was responsible for a lot of people, if they had meetings, I had to be there at 8 or the latest 9. But if there were no meetings, I always tried not to start before 9 o’clock.
You have a very nice Japanese-style garden at your home in Kronberg.
I was often in Japan for Braun, and I was always fascinated by the Japanese garden.
What about it?
The whole arrangement, with the water, the stones, how they cut the trees down to bonsais. So I decided, as I built my house in 1971, not only to insulate the swimming pool but also to make a garden influenced by the Japanese gardens.
There is always something to do there — it’s a kind of design to cut the trees in a way that they are not getting bigger but still have their own charisma. But it is not a real Japanese garden, because we have different weather, so I call it a Japanese-inspired European garden. You have to spend a lot of time on it, and sometimes I don’t have the time, so I hear about it from my wife.
How did you meet your wife?
She’s a photographer. I was falling in love with a photographer who was a friend of hers. They studied together. Then she, the first, decided to marry another man, and leave me with her friend.
So it happened that we lived together a long time without being married; we married after 10 years. We don’t have children. We had a cat — she died — and now we can’t decide if we should get a new one. She was a very special cat.
Are you an only child?
I am the only child. And it was not a nice time. My parents decided in 1940 or 1939 that they couldn’t live anymore together; I was sent to boarding school. I was 14 or 15 as the war was ending. I was living mostly with my grandparents, because before, during the war, everything was difficult. The schools were closed because of the bombings. So I came back to my birth city, Wiesbaden, not far from Frankfurt, and stayed with my grandparents. My grandfather was a carpenter, he specialized in surfaces. I learned from him how to polish pianos, for example.
Were you interested in that?
My interest was to stay with architecture, with additional studies for landscape planning.
You mean urban planning?
Yes. I think it is now very important. There is a lot of bad architecture. What we need more is to look at how our landscape should look in the next decades.
What’s wonderful in New York is that old train park. I want to see that.
The High Line can get very crowded — you should go early. Tell me more about your home. For someone who advocates having “less,” you seem to have collected a lot of things there.
If I don’t have those things, I cannot improve them. I have to work with those things. It doesn’t end when you are finished, especially with the shelf system. It’s improved in a lot of details.
Are you still trying to improve other things?
Most of the things are done already — you can’t make it better. Look at chairs: there are enough chairs. There are bad chairs, some good ones, mostly bad ones. But there are, even with a chair, possibilities to make it more comfortable or, from the economic point, you can make it cheaper, save some material or you can try new materials.
I hear you’ve started a foundation.
The idea behind it is to help young designers to get an education.
Will it also provide funds to preserve your house?
The house belongs to the foundation.
It must be odd to think about things like that.
People say that the house, with all the things, it looks like a museum. Of course it does. There are all those things I worked on, and some things I am still working on. We have nobody, no children. That is the reason we made the foundation. I am interested that it stays in the right hands.
“60s 606 Is 50” runs through May 28 at Vitsoe, 33 Bond Street (Lafayette Street); information: (917) 675-6990 or vitsoe.com.
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