Hans Gugelot Biography - Infos for Sellers and Buyers

Hans Gugelot

Massakar 1920 - Ulm 1965

Hans Gugelot, a designer and architect of Dutch and Swiss descent, studied architecture in Lausanne from 1940 until1942 in Lausanne before transferring to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, which he attended until 1946. For eight years Hans Gugelot freelanced in Max Bill's practice. In 1954 Hans Gugelot met Erwin Braun and embarked on an important collaboration for the electrical appliance firm Braun, for which Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams, head of the design division at Braun, and the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (HfG) developed an extraordinarily successful concept for designing Braun products. From 1954 Hans Gugelot taught at the Ulm HfG, which had been founded the year before by Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-Scholl, and Max Bill.
Braun appliances were designed in a distinctive style based on geometric forms, a reduced palette, and the eschewal of extraneous decoration. Hans Gugelot was a vocal advocate of the Modernist conceptist "form follows function". Consequently, Hans Gugelot was also opposed to what is known as "Detroit styling" and Raymond Loewy's ideas of "facelifting". As Hans Gugelot saw it, good design should not be merely a means to boosting sales but was rather a cultural necessity. Hans Gugelot also worked as a designer for the Pfaff Sewing Machine Company. In 1964 Gugelot developed the "Carousel S-AV 1000" slide projector for Kodak. For Bofinger Hans Gugelot designed built-in furniture such as the "M125" storage system (1954). Between 1959 and 1962, Hans Gugelot, along with Herbert Lindinger, Peter Croy, and Otl Aicher shared in developing the underground rail system in Hamburg. As an architect, Hans Gugelot specialized in pre-fab housing. I
n 1965 Hans Gugelot died a premature death at the age of only forty-five. The Institute for Product Development and Design in Neu-Ulm, which grew out of Development Group 2 at the HfG, headed by Hans Gugelot, continued to apply the rationalist approach to design until it closed in 1974. After Gugelot's death, Development Group 2 was renamed Gugelot Design.