Braun

Overview

Braun is the German manufacturer that produced the most coherent and influential body of industrial design of the twentieth century. Founded in Frankfurt in 1921 as a small engineering workshop, the company became, in the two decades after the Second World War, the definitive example of what a design-led manufacturer could be: a company whose products were recognisably of one family, whose forms were derived from function and production, and whose visual language was so clear that it could be read at a glance.

The central figure in this transformation was Dieter Rams, who joined Braun in 1955 and led its design department from 1961 to 1995. Working first with Hans Gugelot of the HfG Ulm and later with a small internal team, Rams produced a body of work — the SK4 radio-phonograph, the T3 pocket radio, the ET66 calculator — that became the reference point for functionalist design worldwide.

History

Max Braun, a mechanical engineer, founded the company in Frankfurt in 1921 as a workshop for the construction of appliances. By the late 1920s it was producing components for radio sets, and by the 1930s it was manufacturing complete radios.

The decisive shift came after the Second World War. Max Braun died in 1951, and the company was taken over by his sons, Artur and Erwin Braun, who were determined to rebuild it around a new design philosophy. They hired Wilhelm Wagenfeld, a former Bauhaus student, as a consultant, and in 1955 they hired Dieter Rams, a young architect who had trained under Otl Aicher and absorbed the systematic approach of the HfG Ulm.

Rams's first major product, the SK4 radio-phonograph (1956), established the new direction. It abandoned the wooden cabinet in favour of a flat steel chassis and a transparent acrylic lid — a design so radical it was nicknamed "Snow White's Coffin."

Design philosophy

Braun's design philosophy is the clearest practical expression of German functionalism — the principle, inherited from the Bauhaus, that an object's shape should derive from its purpose, material, and mode of production rather than from applied ornament.

1. Form derived from function and production. The SK4's flat chassis is flat because that is the most efficient way to arrange a radio and a turntable.
2. A single visual language across the range. A Braun calculator, a Braun shaver, and a Braun hi-fi receiver all share the same proportions, the same restrained palette, and the same relationship between controls and surfaces.
3. Restraint as a design value. Rams's principle "as little design as possible" is not minimalism for its own sake; it is an argument that the object should not compete with its user.
4. Longevity. Braun products were designed to remain visually and functionally valid for decades.

The Ten Principles of Good Design — innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough, environmentally friendly, and as little design as possible — are the codification of this practice. They were written after the fact, as a summary of what Braun had already been doing.

Key products

• Braun SK4 (1956) — a radio-phonograph that replaced the furniture-style cabinet with a flat steel chassis and a transparent acrylic lid.
• Braun T3 (1958) — a small, rectangular pocket radio with a perforated metal speaker grille.
• Braun ET66 (1987) — a calculator whose button layout and colour coding became the template for the iOS calculator.

The materials that made these products possible — the ABS housings, the steel chassis formed by injection molding and stamping — are themselves case studies in how industrial manufacturing shapes design.

Legacy

Braun's influence is difficult to overstate. The company's visual language — the restrained palette, the rational layout of controls, the flat surfaces, the absence of ornament — became the default language of functionalist product design in the second half of the twentieth century. Jony Ive has acknowledged Rams as a primary influence, and the resemblance between the Braun T3 and the first iPod is not coincidental.

Braun objects are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt, and the Vitra Design Museum.

Related Terms

• Dieter Rams
• Braun SK4