Final ThoughtFinal Thought
DIETER RAMS PLAYS AN UNLIKELY ROLE
IN iGEN CONSUMER CULTURE
WORDS _David Sokol
ILLUSTRATIONS _Kari SilverThe Original
Influencer
094 _ _MAR/APR 2019
In 1955, Sloan Wilson published The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The novel, in
which a World War II veteran ascends and then quits the corporate ladder, synony-
mized American-style capitalism with a devil’s bargain. That same year, a young
German architect named Dieter Rams began work in the design department at a
little-known consumer products company called Braun.
While Wilson’s protagonist stepped off the hamster wheel, Rams built a better
version of it. His early Braun projects, such as the SK4 record player and the
pocket-sized T3 transistor radio, had a minimalism and intuitiveness that almost
justified wartime destruction: They suggested that something wonderful might
flourish in its place. By the 1970 s, when his simultaneous career at Braun and Vitsœ
had produced scores of products and a class of fanatical consumer, Rams grew
leery of the environmental consequences. He in turn measured his designs against
10 principles in which quality equates to functionality, durability and a light-footed
emotional relationship with the user. In Rams’s version of Wilson’s businessman, you
can reject the order of things through invention.
Perhaps because it is so easy to draw a line from Braun to Apple, or maybe
because today’s political unrest and irrational exuberance recalls a 20 th-century
world on fire, culture observers have recently reset their attention on Rams’s story of
principled corporate complicity and transcendence. The new Gary Hustwit docu-
mentary Rams and an ongoing Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective celebrate
the designer’s singular vocabulary and the ethical stance that came to underpin
it. But these are not breezy valedictories; an octogenarian Rams faces Hustwit’s
camera and damns iPhone society – and partly himself– for a rampant, desocializing
consumerism masquerading in his aesthetic. The suit still pinches, and Rams and
his champions want you to feel that.
Gary Hustwit’s film Rams is viewable online at hustwit.vhx.tv