Hans Gugelot: Influential German Designer and Braun Consultant

Hans Gugelot was a key figure in the German postwar reconstruction. Born in Indonesia, he studied in Zurich at the Federal Technical College. Gugelot was a versatile designer whose products and furniture have influenced a generation of designers. He was known for a functional ‘building-block’ approach to design and avoiding decorative detail, whether in furniture, such as the Ml25 storage unit for Bofinger (1956), or the electrical products he designed for Braun. The Carousel S projector and round slide magazine Gugelot were designed for Kodak in 1962 and are considered classic.

I hear that some people keep a pebble in their pocket to play with. Hans Gugelot chose a ball-bearing. Two rings sliding resistance-free provide a worthwhile manual experience but a hand-made ball-bearing is a con- tradiction in itself. Such precise bearings cannot be made by hand. Otl Aicher

Biography – Hans Gugelot

Hans Gugelot was born in 1920 and died in 1965. He worked in engineering from 1940 to 1942 and as an architect in Switzerland from 1940 to 1946. He was closely connected to the radical Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, Germany, and the clean, systematic, and useful designs of Braun products in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In Zurich, he worked in the office of Max Bill, who had graduated from the Bauhaus. In 1954, he followed Bill to the HfG to run the product design program. He believed in the Ulm design theory, favouring a collaborative, multidisciplinary, and empirical approach to design over the traditional idea of the intuitive, creative individual designer.

Consultant to Braun

Gugelot was asked to work as a consultant for Braun. He and two other Ulm professors, Otl Aicher and Fritz Eicher, first worked on the design of radios. He also worked with Dieter Rams of Braun on the sleek design of the SK4 radiogram cabinet in 1956. In the following years, he worked with Gerd Alfred Müller on several other products, such as the Sixtant razor (1962). He also helped his students work on real-world projects, such as making models for the Hamburg UBahn subway system (1959–1962). His other clients included Bofinger, who made the modular M125 office system in 1957, and Kodak, who made the Carousel slide projector (1962).

Sources

Aicher, O. (1994). World as Design: Writings of Design. Germany: Wiley.

Dormer, P. (1991). The Illustrated Dictionary of Twentieth Century Designers.

Woodham, J. M. (2006). A dictionary of modern design. Oxford University Press.

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