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Designed by Buro fur Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main, Germany
Edition Axel Menges, Stuttgart and London 463 pages; illustrated; $78
Some German designers insist that you cannot understand German design without "understanding Ulm," by which they mean the Hochschule fur Gestaltung Ulm (the Ulm School for Design) and its influence. Yet the school existed for just 15 years (from 1953 to 1968), during which time fewer than half of the 637 enrolled students completed their diplomas; a third of them stayed only for a single year of the four-year curriculum. As for the 282 teachers employed at the school during its existence, three-quarters of them taught for a year at most. Internal dissension was rife at Ulm from the start, and there were endless changes of leadership, and even its constitution. How can such an establishment create such a profound influence? This is a question HfG Ulm makes no attempt to answer, a wise choice on the part of the author.
Instead, the book offers a minutely detailed survey of the institutional history of the school, based on a thorough examination of the surviving documents, rather than on present-day interviews with former teachers, students, and administrators. This approach retains the freshness and immediacy of the different players' thoughts and reflections, untainted by hindsight. Rene Spitz, now one of the partners in the Cologne-based advertising agency Rendel and Spitz, developed this book from his doctoral thesis, and he works hard to maintain an objective perspective on Ulm's different factions. Occasionally, though, his incredulity...