The ET 88 World Traveller calculator, based on the classic design by Rams and Dietrich Lubs that was an inspiration for the iPhone calculator app. PHOTO: DHAM SRIFUENGFUNG FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE
ON A MIDSUMMER day at the Wright auction house in Chicago, iconic hair dryers, alarm clocks and toasters conceived by German industrial designer Dieter Rams for housewares firm Braun in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are up for sale, along with Rams-designed audio and video equipment. Pictures posted online drummed up early interest for this first major auction of his vintage designs (featuring 120 pieces from a private collection).
By 1 p.m. the bids are coming in fast. Bob Greenberg, the founder and chairman of digital agency R/GA, whose recent product-design show at New York’s Cooper Hewitt museum—Bob Greenberg Selects—put Rams’s work at its center, bids remotely on a list of items. He pays $562 for a plastic kitchen scale and almost $8,000 for old stereo components, including an amplifier, turntable and tuner. “Beautifully designed products of the past are a very good investment,” he says later, considering his haul.
The action at the auction is captured on camera by the king of design documentaries, filmmaker Gary Hustwit, whose 2007 breakout hit, Helvetica, a deep dive into typeface design, all but launched the genre. Rams, Hustwit’s fourth feature as director and the first full-length film devoted to the design legend, premieres with screenings around the world this month. It was financed partly on Kickstarter, with $300,000 raised from 5,000 backers.
A rough cut reviewed in Hustwit’s Brooklyn office opens with a close-up of fingers striking the keys of a fire engine–red Valentine Olivetti typewriter, circa 1968. A vintage TG 504 Braun reel-to-reel recorder/player hangs on a living room wall. “What is good design?” asks a voice-over in German.
The film cuts to Rams, 86, in tortoiseshell glasses with thinning white hair, at home in Germany, surrounded, as always, by his favorite things, mostly his own classic designs—chairs, tables and shelves conceived decades back for furniture-maker Vitsœ and cult stereo equipment created for Braun. Rams lives in a bubble of his own creation, in the same idealized oasis of timeless design on the edge of the Taunus forest near Frankfurt that he’s occupied with his photographer wife, Ingeborg Kracht-Rams, since 1971 (the house, which he helped design, is already landmarked by his region’s office for the preservation of historical monuments). “I wanted to live with my work, but it was never a museum, it was a living space,” says Rams in German via email. Though he’s declined most interviews lately, he answered a few questions for this article through his longtime personal manager, Britte Siepenkothen, who lives a few houses away.