3x Pairs Of ULM Design School Door Handles Max Bill Bauhaus Design Lasdun Wehag
Item History & Price
| Reference Number: Avaluer:18532 | Type: Architectural |
| Original/Repro: Original | Style: Modernist |
| Style/ Period: Bauhaus | Age: 1940-1960 |
| Material: Aluminium |
A set of Ulm door handles, Max Bill and Ernst Moeckl, 1955
Minor details like door handles were important to Modern Movement architects (as exponents of the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal) and I think that it is fair to say that there are several key designs from the period, associated with key buildings or building projects, that have become iconic.
The handle Ferdinand Kramer created for Ernst May’s ‘New Frankfurt’ social housing project of the mid-1920s is... one (please see my other listings), and this design is another.
The handle is a very slight variant of one that was originally designed by Max Bill and Ernst Moeckl in 1955 for the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG Ulm), while the former was Director and the latter, a student.
It resists the geometry of Kramer’s - and the classic handle Gropius and Meyer created for the Bauhaus - adopting a more elegant form that refers more succinctly its functional interaction with the hand.
Incidentally, Moeckl and Bill also worked together on a notable kitchen clock for Junghans, an example of which is held in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Condition:
The door handles are in excellent condition with only minor signs of use. They come with an interesting provenance, I acquired them some years ago from a resident of Denys Lasdun's Keeling House (1957) in Bethnal Green, London who said that they were part of the original installation.
Makers Marks:
Signed Wehag on the reverse of each of the roses. The company, the name an abbreviation of Wilhelm Engstfeld Heiligenhaus AG (Heiligenhaus being a town in North Rhine-Westphalia between Dusseldorf and Essen), is synonymous with the Modern Movement, having been a manufacturer of the famous Bauhaus door handle designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer from the late 1920s. It also produced Ferdinand Kramer's door handles for Ernst May's New Frankfurt social housing. This direction towards the modernist avant-garde likely reflected the influence of Max Burchartz, who joined the company that year. Burchartz, an enthusiastic exponent of modernism, had attended a still-life course taught by Theo van Doesburg at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1922.
Literature:
Siegfried Gronert, Türdrücker der Moderne, eine Designgeschichte, W. König, Köln, 1991
Text and photographs © Room 606. All rights reserved.
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