Hochschule für Gestaltung

RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus; Black Mountain College; Deutscher Werkbund

The Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (Ulm Institute of Design) was founded in 1953. It closed in 1968 amid the cultural and political upheaval of the period. What made Ulm special was the idea that design should be understood and practiced as a socially relevant and ultimately intellectual occupation (Oswald and Wachsmann, 2015).

The Hochschule für Gestaltung and the Recurring Questions for Design

The importance of the Hochschule for ongoing design debate has several strands, all of which might be said to unfold in different dimensions from questions concerning the relationships between design and society.

One such strand is the question of whether design practices can overcome their historic complicity in the violence and excesses of modernisation as manifested in industrialisation and urbanisation. A related question concerns the further complicity of industrial and urban processes in colonialism and imperialism, in taking part in creating an industrialised, urbanised, hierarchically-superior centre along with its inferiorised peripheries in the unfolding of globalisation.

Wrapped up in these processes of modernisation, understood as (civilisational) progress and (economic) development, is the question of the roles of design practices in the relationships among technological change and material culture; or the gradual recognition of the interpenetration of technological ecologies, material ecologies and biological ecologies all of which, separately and together, might be characterised as ‘culture’ and/or civilisation. In this context, technologisation is no longer understood simply as ‘mechanisation’. The machine can no longer simply be understood as mechanical nor can its operation be solely grasped through mechanical metaphors in the context of industrial production.

Another aspect or face of the same tangle of questions concerns different understandings of the role of ‘the sign’ and semiosis. From one direction, the sign can be understood in the constitution of ‘life’ (biosemiotics), ‘technology’ (information semiotics), ‘culture’ (material-sensible semiotics), ‘sense’ (psycho-semiotics, logico-semiotics or transcendental semiotics), ‘meaning’ (discourse semiotics), ‘action’ (actantial semiotics) and ‘environment’ (material-contextual semiotics). From another direction, the sign can be understood in the context of the role of design in reconfiguring existing semiotic regimes which articulate life, technology, culture, sense, meaning, action and environment.

All of these events and event-horizons, which are not stratified into levels but are interwoven or threaded through one another, might be said to constitute the historical traumas to which the modern-post-modern ‘mind’ or ‘body-mind’, as extended psycho-social-ecological intercorporeal-intersubjectivity, is responding. Those responses play out through a complex deconstructive engagement in which emergent systems continue to shake, while to some extent sustaining, existing traditions as well as their critical re-evaluations.

Together, these processes do not permit emergent systems to become settled, either to form an original grounding (arché) for a new beginning as a rupture with the past or a final ending (telos) for a rupture with the past as a new beginning. Design practices play significant roles in the remembering-forgetting, the re-writing, over-writing or erasing of these traumas, forming palimpsests through which the past continues to be interpreted and re-evaluated and decisions affecting future paths continue to be rehearsed in an oscillating, unsettled and unsettling present.

The History of the Hochschule für Gestaltung

The precursor to the Hochschule was a community college set up by Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher in the south German town of Ulm in 1946. They envisioned the school as a centre for democracy to counter the legacy of German militant nationalism and in doing so to provide postwar German youth with cultural ideals and moral direction. Pedagogically, their central aim was to dissolve the historical antagonism between ‘technical civilisation’, equated with the Nazi legacy of industrialised death and destruction, and German Kultur, the culture of Enlightenment humanism, the humanities and ‘high’ or ‘fine’ art. 

The school’s history, according to Paul Betts (1998), can be said to mark modernism’s last concerted effort to conjoin design, science, social reform and cultural renewal. In seeking to reassert the redemptive potential of design against the corrosive effects of past Nazi irrationalism and ongoing American commercialism, the school aimed to rehabilitate the damaged authority of science and rationality as the models of engaged design education.

In recognising the great need for a new cultural direction in Germany in the post-1945 period, the Hochschule drew up a programme for a school of design on socio-political lines. Their educational concept that articulated an anti-fascist stance with democratic hope. To achieve their pedagogical goal, Scholl and Aicher proposed a ‘universal education’. The curriculum encompassed general media studies, including politics, sociology, journalism, radio, and film, and art instruction, including photography, advertising, painting, and industrial design. This was intended to counter the dangers of excessive reliance on instrumental reason and cultural irresponsibility.

“The HfG wanted to work as a successor of the Bauhaus from its heights above the Danube valley, admittedly with a fundamental difference. While the Bauhaus saw training in fine art as a requirement for the design of good industrial form, the HfG stood for a direct, functional approach to the matter in hand. For this reason Ulm had no studios for painters and sculptors and no craft workshops.”

Stock (2015: 11)

When Walter Gropius made Otl Aicher and his colleagues Walter Zeischegg, Tomás Maldonado and Hans Gugelot the offer of calling the Hochschule für Gestaltung “Bauhaus Ulm”, they refused (Aicher (2015a). It was not their intention, Aicher explains, to make a second Bauhaus. They wanted consciously to distance themselves from it. Writing for the Ulm journal in 1963, Maldonado reflected on the HfG’s relation to the Bauhaus. The deepest line of connection, he suggested, lay in the institutions’ common grasp of the emancipatory potential of industrialised production. The Bauhaus had tried, even though without success, to lay open a humanistic perspective on technical civilisation, in other words, to regard the human environment as a ‘concrete field of design activity’ (Kapos, 2016).

Max Bill, the Swiss sculptor, painter and designer, thought quite differently about these matters than Scholl and Aicher. His appointment of as school director in 1953 radically impacted the the emerging Hochschule‘s tone and outlook. For Bill, the guiding objective should be a more art-oriented design instruction rather than one which emphasised the studies of sociology, cultural theory and politics. As a member of the the Deutscher Werkbund, a German association of artists, architects, designers and industrialists established in 1907, Bill believed that social and cultural reform began with reconstituting the forms of the social environment, such as, city planning, architecture and the design of everyday objects, not with forced political training. Proper design practice, in this view, was itself a kind of political reform and moral re-education for the reason that everyday spaces and objects elicited affective responses from their users.

Nevertheless, despite internal differences of opinion and approach, the Hochschule continued to be infused with a grand vision of social reform based on the reconciliation of art and life, morality and material culture, with culture being understood as being infused in all the material forms present in everyday living.

Although he did not want repetition either, he did, however, want a kind of new Bauhaus, imagining that there would be artists’ studios for painters and sculptors and workshops for goldsmiths or silversmiths, as was the case at the Bauhaus. For Zeischegg and Aicher this was unthinkable. They were interested in designing for daily life and the human environment, in industrial products and social behaviour. In Aicher’s (2015b: 86) words,

“van doesburg or moholy-nagy stood by the primacy of form, which means the same thing as the hegemony of art. In their eyes the criterion for all design was pictures or the picture. art reigned supreme in the bauhaus. … they remained rationalists, and postulated an aesthetic existence above the concrete product. with persistent idealism they raised basic aesthetic forms to a superordinated principle and relegated the product itself to a mere case of application.”

(Aicher, 2015b: 86)

They were no longer prepared to accept that creativity should be classified by objects; that the peak of human creativity was pure aesthetics, without a specific purpose; and that practical matters and things for daily use were of secondary significance. Thus, they held that design means relating thinking and doing and that aesthetics without ethics tends towards deception.

Rather, after the end of the Second World War, they felt they, “had to get back to the matter in hand, to things, to products, to the street, to the everyday, to people.” (Aicher, 2015a: 87). It was not a question of extending or applying art to the everyday, to application. In shaping the everyday, design had become the platform of all kinds of humane creativity. Design, for the ULM school, was not an applied art borrowing its solutions from art.

Bill resigned in 1957, four years after the school opened. He was replaced as rector by the Argentinean painter Tomas Maldonado who had joined the Hochschule faculty in 1954. Maldonado, while sharing the desire to train socially responsible designers rather than commercial artists, rejected Bill’s Werkbund-Bauhaus idealism in favour of a more scientific conception of industrial design.

The work of the Hochschule took place in the context of a changed attitude towards technology. After 1945, taking into account the events the that occurred during the Third Reich and those at Hiroshima/Nagasaki, technology often was treated by West German intellectuals, such as Junger, Giedion, Heidegger and Horkheimer and Adorno, as carrying the stigma of evil and danger. The historical faith in the benevolent marriage of technology and Kultur as well as science and society did not survive the Second World War. Technology could no longer serve as the central figure of German liberation.

In endeavouring to rescue the concept of Industriekultur from its Nazi iteration, by re-setting it within a more humanist tradition of social responsibility and moral education, the staff at the Hochschule were driven by a desire to prevent West German modernity falling into the hands of narrow-minded technocrats, commercial designers and advertising agents.

Science played a key role in the Hochschule’s conception of a post-Nazi redemptive modernisation, giving rise during the late 1950s and early 1960s to the vexed question of how to devise a scientifically-oriented design education that was not compromised by commercial motivations. Bill, for example, had striven to develop the theoretical insights of his former Bauhaus teachers Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, combining spiritual artistic creativity with scientific logic.

For Maldonado, the emergence of modern design as a commercially-driven profession was a result of the Great Depression in the USA, where designers were recruited by business to help aestheticise everyday commodities in order to reinvigorate flagging consumption. Maldonado considered both commercial design and Bill’s notion of the artist-designer as symptoms of the same outdated misconception about the role and meaning of engaged industrial design.

Maldonado’s outline of the stages in design history ran as follows: first, Fordist rationalized mass-production foregrounded the designer as inventor-planner; second, the artist-designer arose as a function of the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression; and third, the designer becomes a coordinator, working in close collaboration with a large number of specialists, the most varied requirements of product fabrication and usage in order to ensure maximum productivity, material efficiency, and the cultural satisfaction of the user. In short, Bill’s autonomous artist-designer had been replaced by the designer as active partner of industry.

By integrating the designer into the industrial process itself, Maldonado had secularised the designer by transferring their sphere of operation from the lofty heights of Kultur to the workaday world of industrial Zivilisation.

Semiotics

One particularly revealing aspect of the school’s ongoing scientisation of its curriculum could be seen in the primacy of semiotics. To a great extent, this stemmed from the larger attempt to decouple design from the trappings of Kultur, namely, morality, taste and aesthetics. Here, Maldonado again led the way, although he drew heavily from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Morris, Anatol Rapoport and especially the long-forgotten West German philosopher and Ulm lecturer Max Bense.

Functionalism

Over the course of the 1960s, a pronounced ‘crisis of functionalism’ occurred within West German architecture and design circles. For many West Germans, the 1920s’ belief in the therapeutic powers of functionalist building and city planning was transformed into a post-1945 nightmare, as its once soaring social and socialist rhetoric had been emptied of any Utopian promise or cultural redemption.

Once a passionate watchword of social democracy and the demystification of Kultur, functionalism was now demonised on all sides as the very expression of the miscarried dreams of postwar reform and renewal.

Science, Technology and Society

The project of reuniting science and society in a grand vision of cultural engagement and political liberation never survived the upheavals of 1968. After that, the focus of design shifted from aestheticising the relationship between people and objects-machines in such practices as interior decoration, advertising, ergonomics and cybernetics, to that between people and the environment, in the ecology movement, park design and urban renewal, as space re-emerged as a new politicised social category in the 1970s. Still, Ulm represented the postwar’s most sustained attempt to rethink the role of social science and political engagement in a post-Kultur world of overproduction, hyper-consumerism and instant commodification.

Nowhere else in West Germany were the problems associated with trying to combine industry and enlightenment, aesthetics and liberation, as well as technology and culture, so passionately explored and debated as in the Hochschule fur Gestaltung.

Pedagogical Innovation; Design Education; Design as Academic Discipline

The period 1960-1962 saw the introduction of the Ulm Model, a novel form of design pedagogy that combined formal theoretical and practical instruction with work in so-called Development Groups for industrial clients under the direction of lecturers. This led to the introduction of theory instruction in subject areas deemed to be essential for the preparation of designers capable of engaging with the complexities within which industrial design now operated. These new subjects included cybernetics, games theory, mathematical operations analysis and ergonomics (Kapos, 2016).

However, even though they amplified Maldonado’s insistence upon the complexity of the various communicative and operational systems within which design for industry was positioned, the approach developed by these more scientifically oriented theorists broke the connection between design and social transformation, a connection that they did not think was valid. They sought the removal of certain curricular elements in a bid to render their analytic processes fully objective. In their positivistic view, the sphere of values, in particular, lacked rational foundation. In the name of rationality, precision and objectivity, the design process was to be purged of all non-rational framing devices, whether these were taken to be normative, ethical or political in kind.

What had begun as rigour descended into what Maldonado referred to disparagingly as ‘methodolatry’.

Things reached a crisis point in 1962, when the science-oriented faculty pressed for a theoretical transformation of the very concept of design, severing the practice’s association with aesthetic form-giving, which it considered the result of a category error, and service to values, which it took to be ill-construed and irrational.

In the face of what was in effect a coup, Aicher, Maldonado and Zeischegg succeeded in restoring a more practically oriented mode of design to its previous position, but only by means of a rearguard action that involved a re-drafting of the school’s constitution.

In the end, politics was reinstated but only on the realisation that design was not, in fact, in a position to nominate its mode of relation to the social world. It was already bound up with the processes of development it had believed itself to influence. Although Bill’s ideal of the artist-designer shaping society from a position of distance had been thoroughly repudiated, the identification of design’s actual integration within destructive social processes forced its return to a similar position of exteriority, albeit one more critical than artistic. 

In the view of Pro-Rector of the Hochschule Claude Schnaidt, extending insights initially developed by Maldonado and sharpened by Abraham Moles, the problem of how design might perform socially under fundamentally antisocial conditions was not to be evolved out of the practice of design under conditions of ‘neo-capitalism’. Indeed, the assumption that design held sufficient resources within itself for the task was itself a hallmark of the idealism that accompanied its persistent failure. Properly construed, the question as to whether the situation lent itself to correction was one of politics, not of design at all (Kapos, 2016). Whatever design’s contribution might be, it would have to be made on the basis of the self-critical recognition of its own practical insufficiency.

Citing the example of modern architecture, which sought to play its part in the liberation of mankind by creating a new environment in which to live, Schnaidt argued that architecture had instead been transformed into a massive enterprise for the degradation of the human habitat. Even though Schnaidt recognised that designers occupy an ambivalent position between the demands of capital and those of human needs, this did not prevent him from pouring scorn on the earlier modernists, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who were content to project their social utopianism at the level of formal perfection. For Schnaidt, the apparent radicalism of these gestures condemned the present by holding it up to an ideal future state, while providing no concrete means whereby there might be a transition from one to the other (Kapos, 2016).

Such conclusions threw the Ulm Model, the Hochschule’s pioneering pedagogical device of combining instruction with practical work for industrial clientele, into doubt. It now transpired that the apparent radicality of fusing educational with industrial activity merely anticipated the tendency of exchange relations to instrumentalise cultural practices. The ideal of the designer’s integration within the production process, the mainstay of the Hochschule’s pedagogy, had to admit a bitter professional reality, first, in the submission of the designer to the findings of market research at the level of practice; and, second, in the structural integration of design into processes of production and reproduction at the level of its social function.

When the relation of design to these socio-political elements was thought through, a more challenging pedagogic model suggested itself, one that would not merely reflect the existing state of things but would contest it by supplying alternatives to practice. For, as Hochschule instructor Gui Bonsiepe observed: ‘if training [education] is not to become an insignificant appendage of ‘industry, it must create its own models and patterns so as to give future practice its bearings; otherwise training will be merely duplication’.

The antagonism between a politically-committed design practice and the social world had to be expressed directly in its practical and pedagogic forms.  Unfortunately, there was to be no opportunity to develop this insight: the fact that the Hochschule was fundamentally at odds with the world was already very well understood by those members of the political class charged with allocating funds to it. From the early 1960s, the Hochschule had faced mounting debts and an increasing dependency on a conservative political class that was not inclined to support it.

In 1968 funding to the school was cut and the Hochschule closed.

References

Aicher, O. (2015a) Bauhaus and Ulm. In The World as design. Berlin, DE: Ernst and Sohn, pp.85-93.

Aicher, O. (2015b) Analogous and digital. Berlin, DE: Ernst and Sohn.

Betts, P. (1998) Science, semiotics and society: The Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung in retrospect, Design Issues, 14(2), pp. 67–82. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1511852 (Accessed: 5 January 2023).

Kapos, P. (2016) Art and design: the Ulm Model, Das Programm. Available at: https://www.dasprogramm.co.uk/learn/writings/view/4 (Accessed: 10 January 2024).

Neves, I. C., Rocha, J. and Duarte, J. P. (2014) Computational design research in architecture: The legacy of the hochschule für gestaltung, Ulm, International Journal of Architectural Computing, 12(1), pp. 1–25. doi: 10.1260/1478-0771.12.1.1.

Oswald, D. and Wachsmann, C. (2015) Writing as a design discipline: the Information Department of the ULM School of Design and its impact on the School and beyond, AIS Design Journal, 3(6), pp. 87–106.

Schnaidt, C. (2013) Architecture and political commitment, Charnel House. Available at: https://thecharnelhouse.org/2013/09/25/architecture-and-political-commitment/ (Accessed: 3 February 2024).

Stock, Wolfgang Jean (2015). Introduction. In Otl Aicher The World as design. Berlin, DE: Ernst and Sohn, pp.10-15.

Weiner, F. (2011?) Beginnings of the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/38187301/Beginnings_of_the_Hochschule_für_Gestaltung_at_Ulm_pdf (Accessed: 10 January 2024).